The Accidental Creative - How To Be Brilliant At A Moment's Notice

As soon as I finished reading this, I bought four more copies for my writer friends. This book will serve creative professionals and dedicated hobbyists of all stripes, from writers, painters, and graphic designers to design engineers and computer programmers.

This book will help you bring a thoughtful structure to your every day creative work. It's work in the best way; Todd teaches you how to examine your life as a whole to make sure that you have the key elements necessary to support your creating over the long term.

So often I find myself exhausted from a long day at work, with little energy left to give to my own personal art. After reading the book I've made some small, intentional changes to my daily habits and I've been excited to find I have so much more left in the tank for my writing and creating sessions. I even find myself waking up early, filled with new ideas. That's in the short term; I'm excited for the long term change to my production.

This book stands on its own (no knowledge of the podcast necessary), but fans of the podcast will especially love this book! It's definitely money well spent and I even find that it is helping me to synthesize the ideas from other creative revolution books like Daniel Pink's "A Whole New Mind." The book has earned a spot on my desk, not on my bookshelf.

Creativity comes and goes; you can't force it. Todd Henry attempts to show how to enhance your creativity. While there were some interesting points in this book, I was not particularly inspired.

The good points for me:

**Ideas how to maintain a creative rhythm. It's perfectly normal to not be in creative mode all of the time. Recognize the down times and make the most of them.

**The concept of focus. Todd suggests that you group like tasks together so you can maintain rhythm and focus. Try not to constantly check your email while trying to do something else. You end up half concentrating on each task.

**Tips on how to manage your energy. Okay, this is common sense, but it's helpful to have it repeated. I'm most definitely a morning person, so that's when I should be doing my tough tasks that require lots of thinking.

**Suggestion to aside time to just think. This is very hard to do in our overly-scheduled, 24/7 connected world, but it will pay off. Start with just one hour a week.

**Learn how to identify and cut your time sinks. Recognize that surfing the Internet is not productive. Sure it may relax you, but it is a big time sink.

What missed the mark for me:

**The book seemed to ramble. Todd goes from defining creativity and its components, to talking about team work, to giving some concrete steps on how to set up your Big 3, those most important loops in your life.

**I'm still not sure how all the chapters fit together. They seem piecemeal.

This book is best enjoyed if you skim and see if a few of Todd's suggestions resonate with you.