How to Be Brilliant at a Moment’s Notice
Todd Henry
Todd Henry is an expert in creativity. In this book, he makes a separation between people who are creatives traditionally and those who are accidental creatives, the people who don’t necessarily see themselves as creative in their job. His aim is to help all creative’s to keep being creative by making creativity a regular process instead of a static burst.
Creatives need to build practices into their lives that allow them to be creative at a moment’s notice or when they have to be. This book will help them be productive in their creative efforts. He says there are no quick fixes or shortcuts. Creatives own their growth.
The author talks first about the dynamics of creative work. Most creative’s rely on their creativity to happen whenever it happens. But when you have to create on demand you have to be brilliant at a moment’s notice. The author recommends putting into place practices that will cause creativity to happen regularly.
He calls creatives to me prolific, brilliant, and healthy. He says creativity needs to work within its boundaries. Our days require structure. We work within the rhythms of life. He describes five areas creatives need to improve: focus, relationships, energy, stimuli, and hours. It spells fresh.
In the second chapter, the author discusses team work. Teams rely on organization. Creatives like to break new ground more than they like to organize. He talks about intentions of working within a team. He describes tensions such as time versus value, predictable versus rhythmic, and product versus process.
Henry deals with the side effects of these tensions and how they can derail creativity. He describes these enemies of creativity as dissonance, fear, and expectation escalation. We tend to complicate things. He further describes these enemies of creativity. I think understanding the enemy is crucial to winning the battle.
Next, he talks about fear. Creatives fear failure or making mistakes. He describes a fear that surprised me, and probably with surprise you too. We have many fears and all of them are fear with our creativity. He also talks about how expectation can derail creativity.
For the rest of the book the author gives us practices that can help us to feed all these enemies of creativity. This is the most helpful part of the book. He gives practices creative’s can put into their daily work and lives dealing with the five core principles of focus, relationships, energy, stimuli (what we feed our minds with), and hours (how we spend our time).
He follows these chapters with a chapter called checkpoint in which he discusses putting it all together. These help you stay on course. He talks about the benefits of having checkpoints. He describes the breakdown of checkpoints in a weekly, monthly, and quarterly schedule. Each checkpoint focuses on everything else he has talked about during the book.
The last chapter the book is entitled Cover Band. The creative work we do will take time, but we must commit time every day to it. That’s the only way we will make this world better with our art. We need to bring our full passion to what we do. He made a great point when he said that imitating the creativity of others will only get you so far but your best work is in doing original work of your own.
Todd Henry forages a new path in my opinion on creativity. He is the first author I have read who has given a framework for how to keep your creative juices flowing. This book is very helpful to any creative who struggles with spurts of creativity. He will help you set disciplines in motion that will keep your creativity going.
