Category — inspiration

Michael Michalko

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THINKERTOYS will teach you how to generate new ideas for businesses, markets, sales techniques, and products and product extensions. Packed with fun and practical tools and exercises, it outlines 30 practical linear and intuitive techniques that can be used by individuals or groups to tackle and solve business problems in fresh, creative ways.

An updated edition of the best-selling business creativity book, with more than 30 brainstorming techniques and hundreds of creative-thinking tips and tricks. Revision includes new techniques, examples, and sections on group brainstorming and endgames.

View More about Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques (2nd Edition)

Martha Beck

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Put the telescope away; the North Star mentioned here is a human body, not a heavenly one. And like Polaris, which has guided sailors for centuries, the human body’s gut feelings and emotions can help guide a wayward soul back to his or her “essential self.” In this absorbing combination of detailed self-awareness exercises and true stories from her own counseling experience (equal parts sobering and hysterically entertaining), Harvard-trained sociologist Martha Beck invites readers to explore their heart’s desires and the vast social webs that keep such desires in check. The goal is not to forsake the “social self” and indulge every emotional impulse of the “essential self.” Rather, Beck gives readers the tools and the encouragement to achieve maximum happiness by harmonizing these typically divergent voices.

Beck (author of Expecting Adam) admits that repairing a damaged emotional compass and setting out on such a vital journey–which often involves painful realizations and changes–”has all the combined attractions of suicide and childbirth.” But the payoff, she concludes, is a love affair with real life. To that end, she walks readers through a lengthy exercise to evaluate their current lifestyle’s pleasures and pains, teaches the process of listening to the body for directional cues, describes how to extract “soul shrapnel” (healing all those nasty, self-defeating emotional wounds), and provides an intriguing “Map of Change” to achieve an authentic life. Beck’s impressive knowledge, her engaging (if somewhat irreverent) voice, and her ability to parse this scary process into achievable steps make her a new champion in the self-help arena. –Liane Thomas

View More about Finding Your Own North Star: Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live

Although it has a blogger or web worker slant for many of the items, many more of the items in 101+ Resources for Creative Minds are great for any creative endeavor.

Check it out: http://www.skelliewag.org/110-resources-for-creative-minds-121.htm

Joseph M. Marshall

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View More about Keep Going: The Art of Perseverance

Sark

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acidfreeink.com says: My partner sent me this book (via Amazon!) when I was going through a particularly hard time in my life. He had not read it, but a coworker mentioned the book to him and he thought it would be something I would like. While laying on my couch at home sick with pneumonia the doorbell rang and this book was delivered. I read it that day from cover to cover that day. This book touched me deeply - I credit it (and SARK) with helping me take my first step to making my creative dreams real. (I have also gone on to buy every other book SARK has written). If you are having trouble remembering what it is to live life with joy, Inspiration Sandwich will help you take the first steps to getting there.

an amazon.com customer says: Believe in daily miracles!
And let discovering SARK’s books be one of them! This book is filled with SARK’s distinctive handwritten thoughts and doodles. The colored inserts are a touch that adds some visual jump to the book. I particularly like the inserted small book ‘Daily Miracles’: there are miracles everywhere, relax, fill your heart with wonder, you are not alone, have an adventure, relax. These thoughts are the backbone of “Inspiration Sandwich” and SARK gives all kinds of great examples and suggestions on how to incorporate them into your life. If you’re looking for some ideas on how to add joy and passion to your life, in SARK’s words, “Eat this book”.

View More about Inspiration Sandwich: Stories to Inspire Our Creative Freedom

Steven Pressfield

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DO YOU:

1. dream about writing the Great American Novel?
2. regret not finishing your paintings, poems, or screenplays?
3. want to start a business or charity?
4. wish you could start dieting or exercising today?
5. hope to run a marathon someday?

If “yes,” then you need THE WAR OF ART. Now, in this powerful, straight-from-the-hip examination of the internal obstacles to success, bestselling author Steven Pressfield shows readers how to identify, defeat, and unlock the inner barriers to creativity. THE WAR OF ART is an inspirational, funny, well-aimed kick in the pants guaranteed to galvanize every would-be artist, visionary, or entrepreneur.Steven Pressfield enjoys great international success as a bestselling novelist.But in order to reach the top he had to do a lot of work to fight the inner demons that told him he couldn’t make it.THE WAR OF ART is his challenge to creative block, and his succinct, straight-from-the-hip style will help every reader unleash their personal ambitions, be they literary, artistic, or business-minded. According to Pressfield, the internal obstacle to success is Resistance.Resistance is the difference between the life you lead and the life you want to lead, and can take many forms.Pressfield shows readers how to identify and defeat Resistance at every turn and challenges them to change their amateurish, unsuccessful habits into a professional attitude that can get the job done. Finally, Sun Tzu for the soul!Inspirational, funny, and a great kick in the pants, THE WAR OF ART is the perfect book for anybody who had a goal circumvented by life and circumstance:which is to say, you and everybody you’ve ever met.

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Stephen Inwood

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A thoroughly readable and enjoyable book about the intellectual colleague and contemporary of Christopher Wren and Isaac Newton in 17th century London. The writing is witty and engaging and provides a vivid look at the social, scientific and physical structure of London after the Great Fire. I especially enjoyed the author’s humorous descriptions of the machinations behind the scenes of the Royal Society and the often dangerous and bizarre experiments that Hooke and others would perform for the Society. A great peep into the development of many engineering, physics, astronomical chemistry and architectural discoveries.

View More about The Forgotten Genius: Biography of Robert Hooke 1635-1703

Caroll Michels

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The classic handbook for launching and sustaining a career that “explodes the romantic notion of the starving artist”, with new and expanded resources for succeeding in the burgeoning Internet art market (The New York Times)Now in its fifth edition, with over 85,000 copies of previous editions sold, How to Survive and Prosper as an Artist is the preeminent guide to taking control of your career and making a good living in the art world. Drawing on over two decades of experience, Caroll Michels walks artists through the complicated process of balancing grants, gallery representation, private dealer sales, and a personal studio to ensure a public profile and a steady income. Included is a wealth of insider’s information on getting into a gallery, being your own PR agent, and negotiating prices, as well as innovative marketing, exhibition, and sales opportunities for various art disciplines. The new edition is fully updated with strategies for using the Web-everything from generating income through freelance work, to creating an entrepreneurial web site for promoting work to agents and clients, to assessing online galleries. An expanded and updated appendix adds more than 200 new resources such as Web designers, insurance and legal services for artists, internships, art colonies, and corporate and public art programs.

View More about How to Survive and Prosper as an Artist, 5th ed.: Selling Yourself Without Selling Your Soul

Duane Packer

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AcidFreeInk says: Despite the cheesy cover and the sometimes foofy spirituality, this is a great practical and inspirational guide to creating abundance while on your creative journey.

Amazon says:
This book is a course in manifesting and creating abundance in your life, Section I, Creating Money, is a step-by-step guide to the art of manifesting. You will learn how to discover what you want, drawing things to you that will fulfill and satisfy you, that are even better than what you ask for. You will learn advanced techniques of manifesting and how to work with your own energy and the power of magnetism to draw things into your life in the fastest, easiest way possible.

The second section of this book, Developing Mastery, will help you learn to work with and move through any blocks you may have about allowing abundance into your life. The third section, Creating Your Lifes Work, will help you learn to make money and create abundance through doing the things you love. You will learn many simple energy techniques to draw your ideal job to you, discover your life’s work, and do what you love for a living. The fourth section, Having Money, is about having and increasing money and abundance in your life. You will learn how to create joy, peace, harmony, clarity, and self-love with your money, letting it flow and increase.

View More about Creating Money: Keys to Abundance (Roman, Sanaya)

Paulo Coelho

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An inspirational tale about following your dreams.

My Heart Is Afraid that it will have to suffer,” the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky.”Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams.”

Every few decades a book is published that changes the lives of its readers forever. The Alchemist is such a book. With over a million and a half copies sold around the world, The Alchemist has already established itself as a modern classic, universally admired. Paulo Coelho’s charming fable, now available in English for the first time, will enchant and inspire an even wider audience of readers for generations to come.

The Alchemist is the magical story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who yearns to travel in search of a worldly treasure as extravagant as any ever found. From his home in Spain he journeys to the markets of Tangiers and across the Egyptian desert to a fateful encounter with the alchemist.

The story of the treasures Santiago finds along the way teaches us, as only a few stories have done, about the essential wisdom of listening to our hearts, learning to read the omens strewn along life’s path, and, above all, following our dreams.

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