Ready for the World ft. Vicki Tan | Config 2026

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🎥 Ready for the World ft. Vicki Tan | Config 2026

Figma Config 2026 · Mezzanine stage. Duration: 24 min

Timestamps

  • 0:00 Config 2026 intro
  • 1:30 Vicki Tan takes the stage
  • 2:30 Floating charge of energy
  • 4:30 Behavioral science and the bias codex
  • 6:30 From movable wheel to manuscript
  • 8:30 Years stuck; mapo tofu story
  • 11:00 Ask This Book a Question tour
  • 13:30 Proposal as flowchart
  • 15:30 Illustrators and covers that missed her voice
  • 17:30 Blue door; unmistakably mine
  • 19:30 The topics she kept avoiding
  • 21:00 Pentel lead and remembering her dad
  • 22:30 Kishotenketsu; friends who followed their energy
  • 23:30 David Whyte poem

Vicki Tan is a product designer who never set out to be an author. At Config 2026 she tells the real story behind Ask This Book a Question: years stuck between concept and proposal, a book built in Figma, and the moment she stopped trying to sound polished and started sounding like herself.

  1. Tan names the restlessness that won’t settle. Marie-Louise von Franz, Jung’s closest collaborator, called it a floating charge of energy not yet attached to its right object. Traditional Chinese medicine calls it stagnant chi. It is not quite anxiety or boredom. It is directional pull toward something you cannot yet name, and Tan’s whole talk is what happened when she followed it.

  2. She came to decision-making through behavioral science, not self-help. Cognitive biases felt like secret codes for noticing when your brain runs on autopilot. But naming a mechanism rarely changes behavior. Designers change behavior every day by showing how things work, not explaining theory. The cognitive bias codex is cool to look at, she says, but not usable in real life.

  3. The social-media version of her arc is wheel, spreads, pocket guide, manuscript, hardcover. The real version includes years stuck between concept and proposal, plus a pandemic break. She was living in Brooklyn, walking Fort Greene with a friend who wanted to quit her job. Tan tried loss aversion and status quo bias. Her friend already understood all of it cognitively. She was still stuck.

  4. The mapo tofu dinner is where the book clicked. Over Taiwanese food like her mom used to make, Tan described structuring time off around a self-reinforcing budget: the more self-sustaining her projects, the more she could explore. Quitting stopped feeling like one enormous scary decision and started feeling possible. The bias was denomination effect: we overweight big things and undervalue small recurring ones. Naming it mattered less than feeling it. Mapo tofu became the first story she wrote.

  5. Ask This Book a Question is for adults, not children. Tan designed the whole thing in Figma. It is choose-your-own-adventure: you bring a stuck question, pass it through lenses of topic, subtopic, and timing (urgent vs. once-in-a-lifetime), land on a story from her life or her mentors, then see which biases showed up in situ. Each bias gets a light-and-shadow page: when it helps, when it hurts. Jung’s line about making the unconscious conscious, applied to everyday decisions.

  6. She had never written a book proposal and had never taken a writing class. So she started with design. The proposal looked like a flowchart you navigate the way you would an app. That is where the choose-your-own-adventure structure formed. Writing was one part of the book; helping readers understand, connect, and make hard things easier to grasp was the rest, and that is what she already knew how to do.

  7. Professional polish kept failing the voice test. Illustrator friends Ryan and Karen produced beautiful work: clay line work, playful scenes of Tan and her dog Charlie. A hired cover designer delivered polished concepts from her ideas. The publisher kept saying the same thing: too professional, not her. She went back to a rough blue-door sketch she regretted showing and, grudgingly at first, agreed it had her inside and out. The final book uses her unrefined illustrations and non-literary prose. Imperfect, unmistakably hers.

  8. The hardest part was not craft. It was what the writing demanded emotionally. She mapped readers’ stuck questions into topics and subtopics, then kept pushing the personal ones to the bottom: relationships, purpose, feelings she had not figured out herself. With the deadline near, she found an old journal entry about shoplifting Pentel 0.5 mm lead as a kid in an office-supply store. The clerk called her out. Her dad defended her without hesitation. He died suddenly at almost twelve while playing basketball on a Sunday morning, and for years those memories went quiet.

  9. Writing gave her a reason to look harder. The office-goods memory came back vivid and textured, as if remade in the act of looking. A meditation teacher reframed remembering as re-membering: reconnecting parts of yourself you cut off. Once she stopped treating feelings as interruptions, more recollections returned. Pentel lead was one of the last stories she wrote, and after it the rest had more room.

  10. She structures the talk itself as kishotenketsu (起承轉合): introduction (起, follow curiosity), development (承, use what you have), turn (轉, let it transform you), and conclusion (合, everything is waiting for you). It is a four-part form from classical Chinese poetry. Unlike the hero’s journey, nothing fully resolves. You change because of what you notice from the inside.

Kishotenketsu (起承轉合) from Vicki Tan’s Config 2026 talk: follow curiosity, use what you have, let it transform you, everything is waiting for you

Her friends show the pattern: a design professor running a tiny Taiwanese micro-farm with her mom, teaching locals to cook with native plants; a design-manager-turned-musician building setlist trackers and stem libraries. Things only they could have made by following their energy.

  1. She closes on 合 with David Whyte’s poem “Everything Is Waiting for You.” Soap dishes, window latches, kettles singing: alertness as the hidden discipline of familiarity. The invitation is to notice where your energy leads, and if you want a companion, she wrote the book.

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