Book Review: Creative Confidence

I found Creative Confidence while wandering through Powell's City of Books in Portland, Oregon.  As per the usual, I had decided to limit my book-spree by purchasing only one children's book, one personal development book, and one fun book.  On this particular excursion, Creative Confidence ended up being the personal development book. 

Creative Confidence was written by Tom and David Kelley, two brothers who have somehow both gravitated to Innovation and Creativity as life pursuits.  Tom is the author of The Art of Innovation and David is the Founder of IDEO.  I know, you may of heard of it!

Here is the Creative Space rating:

Readability:  A
Creates Consistent Interest:  B
Applicability:  B
Design:  B
Differentiation:  B

For a complete description of the Creative Space rating system, click HERE.

The book was an easy read for sure.  The writers are casual, there are fun cartoons and pictures, and the book just feels good.

Creative Confidence Top Ten

1.  The Creativity Myth vs. Creative Confidence:  The creativity myth is described in Creative Confidence as the believe that creativity is limited to the traditional artsy fields like painting, writing, sculpting, whatever.  This book asserts that everyone has the potential to be creative in their given field, but we have over time lost the confidence to pull out the mental crayons and attack that blank page.

2. Go Wide then Go Deep.  I took a Harvard Business School class on Innovation a few years ago.  They opened with a discussion of Divergent vs. Convergent thinking.  Same idea.  Throw out as many ideas as possible, narrow down to the most feasible, viable, and desirable, and then dig deep to get the idea to implementation. 

3. Have a Growth Mindset:  Carol Dweck, a Stanford psychology professor, is quoted in the book describing individuals with a growth mindset.  They "believe that a person's true potential is unknown and unknowable; that it is impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil and training." The opposite is a fixed mindset. 

4. Intentionality:  Intentionality is discussed during a description of a project worked on with Steve Jobs.  (Which I of course hate because Apple is the most overused creativity and innovation example on the planet).  It is described as the ability to see a way to improve the status quo and then seizing the opportunity.  Easier way to say it- Have an idea.  Do it.

5. Self-Efficacy:  For those not familiar with this term, it is simply the belief that you can do what you set out to do in the world.  Developing self-efficacy is of course an important first step in developing Creative Confidence, but during this book, it really got me thinking more about whether self-efficacy is a growing or declining personality trait in our society.  Conundrum.

6. Strategies to get from blank page to insight:

• Choose creativity.
• Think like a traveler.
• Engage relaxed attention
• Empathize with your end user.
• Do observations in the field.
• Ask questions, starting with why?
• Reframe challenges.
• Build a creative support network.

I think it is highly worth getting the book just to read threw these tips and tricks.  "Engage relaxed attention" was my favorite and really brings you back to some of the neuroscience findings related to the switching between focused attention and daydreaming mode.

7. Cool quote from Steven Pressfield's book Resistance:  "Most of us have two lives, the life we live and the unlived life within us.  Between the two stands Resistance... Late at night, have you experienced a vision of the person you might become, the work you could accomplish, the realized being you were meant to me?  Are you a writer who doesn't write, a painter who doesn't paint? an entrepreneur who never starts a venture?  Then you know what Resistance is."


8. If you want a team of smart creative people to do extraordinary things, don't put them in a drab, ordinary space.  I'm obviously a big believer in this concept.  As a former member of the khaki cubicle society, I know how stifling it is to not be able to inject a single piece of personality into your working space.  We even had template desktop backgrounds.  We were like an army of clones.

9. "Leaders can't dictate culture, but they can nurture it."  I'm in the middle of taking a class on emotional intelligence, which posits that developing resonant relationships within organizations is one of the most important functions that a manager can engage in.  Similarly, developing this creative environment and letting go of control to let your people do their thing drives creative confidence within an organization.

10. Just get started.

Creative Confidence was an easy read and a fun read.  One limitation though is that it is highly focused on the kind of creativity problems that IDEO solves, so, essentially, the examples in the book are very "stuff" driven, so if you are working in consulting or in a service industry, while there is plenty that is applicable, there is also quite a bit that won't be.