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The authors Tom and David Kelley work together at the Stanford design school, where they help both people and companies to think creatively. In Creative Confidence, they share their personal experiences with many clients as well as some of the exercises they use to help students improve their creativity. They are strong believers that everyone is creative and can learn to access their innate creativity.

Given the description, I was hopeful that this book would contain advice that would help me come up with more creative research ideas. I was disappointed to find that much of their advice seemed like it would be more helpful to someone in a business or design position than to someone doing research. While some of their exercises could be modified or extrapolated from, I found little to be applicable directly. For instance, many of their suggestions center on trying something, anything just to get started and then refining. This could potentially work for me during the idea generation phase but is really awful advice for starting a research project (a far better approach would involve a lot of pre-planning).

In addition to not being personally applicable, I had a few other problems with the book. Almost all of the book was centered on personal stories and anecdotes. Research supporting their advice was hardly ever mentioned. Each chapter was supposed to focus on one step on the path to becoming more creative, but there were so many anecdotes that seemed unrelated to the overall theme that I often lost track of the point of a given chapter. They were a bit short on specific advice too. There was one chapter that had perhaps ten ideas for getting started, but many of these required a group to implement them. Finally, at times I felt the authors were simply advertising their design school. The name of the school was mentioned on nearly every page and I felt the authors relied heavily on buzz words to describe their work.

That said, I don’t think I’m the target audience of this book. The specific examples of innovation and design might be more inspiring or even directly useful to people in other fields. The writing was clear and easy to follow. The choice to gather all of their advice into specific activities in one chapter could make this a great reference book. I was incredibly impressed by how well my ARC ebook was formatted already as well, so if you think this could be useful to you, don’t hesitate to buy it in that format. Hopefully someone in business or design will  be better able to use this book.

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There’s just something about lists of “the top 10 ways to…” or “the seven easy habits for…” that seems a little bit gimmicky to me. For that reason, I had much lower expectations of this book than of the more academic creativity book I reviewed earlier this week. Boy were my expectations backwards. The other book was interesting, but I was sorely disappointed by it’s lack of useful advice. By contrast, this book was nothing but useful advice.

Actually, the book wasn’t quite all advice. The very beginning was a fun personality test, a version of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test. Then the rest of the book is broken up into sections, one corresponding to each possible result of the test. Based on your results, one of these creative types is considered your main talent and a second is considered your auxiliary talent. Not everything the author said about my types was true of me, but a lot of it was – certainly enough that her potential creativity blocks sounds familiar and her advice for overcoming them seemed very useful.

I liked the author’s writing style a lot. She has an earnest, helpful tone and is very optimistic in her type descriptions. The negatives of each type are mostly mentioned after the description and are always paired with techniques for overcoming those downsides. She did approach the subject of creativity from a business perspective, but surprisingly I still found nearly all her advice helpful. The least useful sections for me were those on working with or directing a team, since graduate research is more of a solitary pursuit. My favorite part by far was the list of the types of questions each type might ask when approaching a problem. I think every type of creativity has something to contribute and using her questions to get a new perspective seems like it could be a great way to brainstorm.

I’m still undecided, but I’m seriously thinking of buying this one. It’s one I could see coming back to and consulting later. Personally, my biggest block to creativity lately has been fear of failure when trying new things that are outside my comfort zone – I like having all the facts! But one of the suggestions the book makes is to be more open to possibilities and to shake up your routine, which is something I’ve been trying to do with more or less enthusiasm for a while now. Hopefully I can bring that mindset to my research a little more too

Do you feel there are any particular challenges you have to overcome to be creative? Any tips on overcoming my block?

Who should read this? anyone who thinks they’re not creative or who wishes they were more creative, anyone working at a job that rewards creativity

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Title: 

Have you ever wished you were more creative? I certainly have and not just because it would be awesome if I could draw. As a grad student, one of the most challenging aspects of research is being able to come up with creative new ways to solve problem. As in many fields, that makes creativity not just a hobby, but a career promoting skill. This book is a synthesis of the latest research related to creativity, particularly major breakthroughs and works of artistic genius.

As a scientist myself, I appreciate and trust non-fiction based on research, so I had high hopes for this one. Smart World looks at creativity from a network perspective, viewing geniuses as people particularly gifted at navigating a network of ideas. And yes… that is as abstract as it sounds. Fortunately, as a computer science major, I was pretty comfortable reading a book where each chapter applies a concept from traditional networks to the the author’s proposed “idea space”. Unfortunately, the author supported his assertion with entirely anecdotal evidence that could be interpreted in a variety of ways.  He also provided very little of the practical advice I hoped would follow the introduction of his theory.

As you might expect from a book that’s heavy on theory, Smart World was written in a very academic fashion. Occasionally aspects of the author’s theory were thought-provoking and made me think about how I do research. Those were the high points. The rest of the time the author’s rules for network behavior were so abstract they were hard to think about in any meaningful way. As a final disappointment, his section intended to give more applicable advice was very short and not very helpful. I therefore finished the book feeling like it presented a novel but essentially useless way of looking at the world.

Who should read this? computer science majors interested in network theory applications, someone interested in a very philosophical and abstract discussion of creativity

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