Why You Should Read The Creative Habit

Book Reviews

So you’re not a dancer.  You’re not a musician.  You’re not an artist or a poet.  Why read this book?  Because you have ideas: ideas for new population studies, new treatments for disease, and new ways to look at data.  And this book will give you the habits that beget more good ideas and allow you to take advantage of them when they show up.  For creativity, as choreographer and author Twyla Tharp stresses, is not an inborn characteristic nor merely the odd bolt of inspiration; it is a collection of patterns and practices that allow anyone to create—as long as they’re willing to put in the work.

Tharp begins by describing how she has aligned her own life to foster creativity, because “[e]verything is usable….But without proper preparation, I cannot see it, retain it, and use it.  Without the time and effort invested in getting ready to create, you can be hit by the thunderbolt and it’ll just leave you stunned.”  She knows her own “creative DNA” (there’s a questionnaire included for you to discover yours), creates and hews to rituals to make beginning a project automatic rather than scary, and daydreams creatively (see p. 30 for a primer on how).  Included in proper preparation is mastery of the fundamentals of one’s art—the basic barre work for a ballerina, grammar and diction for a writer—through “perfect practice,” and a lot of it.  (Tharp doesn’t let anyone off easy.)

She then arranges the rest of the chapters as a journey through her creative process, from how she “scratches” for inspiration, to how she determines the “vital…difference between good planning and too much planning,” to how she benefits from both resources and limits.  If you’ve ever had to figure out a novel method of running an experiment because the money just wasn’t there to do it any other way, you know what she’s talking about.

She ends each chapter with several helpful and unusual “exercises” built around the same theme: getting out of a rut, or determining the critical “spine” of your work.

Perhaps because of her dance background, Tharp’s advice is rich with visual metaphor, such as her description of planning as scaffolding around a construction site that goes away as the building rises above the ground.  This background of course gives rise to many exercises and habits grounded in physical movement, but they aren’t just for dancers; anyone can do “Egg” (112) or “Do A Verb” (203).  They are, as she writes, “exercise[s] that teach…you how to accomplish the most difficult task in any creative endeavor: begin.”

So if you’re finding it hard to sit down and write that manuscript, or turn that great idea into a workable study, take a look at this book, and get into the habits of creativity.

The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It For Life
Twyla Tharp with Mark Reiter
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003

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Recapture Your Free Time with How to Write a Lot

Book Reviews / Productivity / Writing & Publishing

Do you find your grant-writing intruding on time you’d rather spend with your family?  Did revisions to that last journal article ruin your vacation?  Then this book might be just the thing you need.

Author Paul Silvia wanted to call How to Write a Lot  “How to Write More Productively During the Normal Work Week With Less Anxiety and Guilt, but no one would buy that book.”  As the brevity of the volume indicates, his secret is simple: Create a schedule and stick to it.  Of course, simple in theory and simple in practice are different things, so Silva spends the rest of the book on methods to make keeping a writing schedule easier, and includes sections on how to write more clearly, better organize a manuscript, and submit your best work to journals and publishers, all of which will help you become a more productive writer.  Although Silva is an Associate Professor of Psychology, his tips and tricks hold true for academics in almost any field.

“If you allot 4 hours a week for writing,” Silva says, “you will be surprised at how much you will write.  By surprised, I mean astonished; and by astonished, I mean dumbfounded and incoherent.  You’ll find yourself committing unthinkable perversions, like finishing grant proposals early….You’ll be afraid to talk with friends in your department about writing out of the fear that they’ll think, ‘You’re not one of us anymore’—and they’ll be right.”  Though four hours is a good starting point, your own schedule and needs will dictate how much time you allot.  The key is the regularity rather than sheer number of hours.

Still unconvinced?  Silva breaks down several “specious barriers” to keeping a writing schedule in the second chapter.  If you need to do more reading, your allotted writing time can be used for anything related to writing, including reviewing page proofs, crunching statistics, or reading articles.  Can’t write without a better computer/desk/printer?  Check out page 21 for Silva’s Spartan setup, including a plastic chair and a laptop with no internet connection (it keeps distractions to a minimum).  Waiting for inspiration?  That’s the most specious barrier of all, because as a chart on page 25 shows, in an experiment where some people were asked to write on a schedule and others only when they were inspired, those who write on a schedule wrote three times as much as the “spontaneous” writers, and had twice as many creative ideas.  Silva backs up all his recommendations with evidence from behavioral studies and personal experience that is often as witty as it is insightful.

“Writing is a grim business,” Silva writes, but if you follow the advice in this book, you can find ways to release its stranglehold on your free time, leaving you much less grim.

How to Write a Lot, Revised Edition
Paul J. Silvia
Washington, D.C.: APA Life Tools, 2018

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Why you should read The Opposable Mind

Book Reviews / Management & Leadership

For fifteen years prior to this book’s publication, author Roger Martin studied successful leaders, interviewing more than fifty of them for up to eight hours at a time, trying to find a pattern to their success.  The pattern he discovered was what he calls “integrative thinking.” Such thinkers have the predisposition and capacity to hold two diametrically opposing ideas in their heads.  And then, without panicking or simply settling for one alternative or the other, they’re able to produce a synthesis that is superior to either opposing idea.

Martin breaks this way of thinking into four identifiable differences from conventional thinking: First, when integrative thinkers face a problem, they include as many “salient features,” or points of consideration, as possible.  They welcome the mess, because it assures them that they haven’t edited out features necessary to the contemplation of the problem as a whole.  This is critical for all the steps, which rely on looking at problems as a whole rather than as component parts.  Relationships between parts of a problem are multidirectional and nonlinear (considering these is the second step of integrative thinking), and considering these relationships and components as a whole avoids the trap of coming up with the perfect solution that’s impossible to execute, or which will solve one part of the problem but worsen another (yep, that’s the third step).  Finally, rather than settling for one option or another, integrative thinkers ?search for creative resolution of tensions, or the best of both worlds, even if it means delays and rework at the last minute.

Martin illustrates this process with a case study of the Four Seasons Hotel, whose founder refused to settle for either large, lavishly-appointed but impersonal hotels or small, cozy motels that lacked state-of-the-art amenities, instead creating a business model that provides both.  Other examples discussed include the Institute for OneWorld Health, whose founder decided it was “unacceptable!” that many lethal diseases afflicting primarily the world?s poor went unacknowledged by traditional for-profit pharmaceutical companies.  She filled the structural gap between companies that developed new drugs they needed to sell at high prices to recoup costs, and non-profit organizations that distributed existing drugs to the world?s poor at subsidized rates, with a not-for-profit pharmaceutical development company.  Have there been instances in your career where you had to choose between the proverbial rock and a hard place?  Then you need to read this book.

As Martin acknowledges, The Opposable Mind largely chronicle[s] the obvious that has been taken for granted.  However, looking at the obvious from new angles and considering new salient features is the first step of integrative thinking.  What better place to start than right at the beginning?

The Opposable Mind
Roger Martin
Harvard Business Review Press, 2009

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Don’t Delay (Or Do). Read Wait: The Art and Science of Delay

Book Reviews

wait-largeDid you know that speakers who frequently pause for short periods are more persuasive than those who don’t?  Or that not lingering on a date that’s going well can make a new relationship stronger?  What about the fact that taking some time before apologizing causes the wronged person to view the apology as more sincere

Frank Partnoy, a corporate lawyer and former investment banker who also happens to write Wall Street exposes such as F.I.A.S.C.O. and Infectious Greed, says that most people, influenced by the rapid pace of modern life, tend to react too quickly—shooting off an email without thinking enough about the content, say—and that instead, “we generally should delay the moment of decision until the last possible instant.  If we have an hour, we should wait fifty-nine minutes before responding.  If we have a year, we should wait 364 days.  Even if we have just a half a second, we should wait as long as we possibly can.  Even milliseconds matter.”

Although this position flies in the face of popular wisdom, Partnoy marshals convincing evidence from psychologists, economists, business analysts, military strategists, and even sports scientists to demonstrate the benefits of delay.  Baseball players who spend the longest waiting for the ball to arrive before swinging stand the best chance of hitting a home run.  Programmers often write short pauses into their code to prevent data packet traffic jams.  Famously, the use of checklists in operating rooms almost halves OR deaths.  As Partnoy writes, the value of a checklist in any stressful, fast-paced scenario is that, like waiting for the baseball to approach the plate, it forces people consider their actions before they act.  Taking just “a few extra seconds before the incision helps to slow down the tempo of a surgical procedure, and that slower tempo leads to better outcomes.”

Partnoy peppers the book with other intriguing findings: we feel we work longer hours not because we do (“if you actually work longer hours than your parents did, you are an outlier,” he notes), but because technology enables us to do many things at once, and “the intense focus required by multitasking makes us slower and less efficient at our jobs, even as it stretches our perception of work time.”  Think getting paid more might negate that feeling?  Think again; the more someone is paid, the more time pressure they feel.  And fascinatingly, he reports on one study that found subliminally flashing fast food logos at people interfered their ability to take pleasure from attractive photos and pleasant music.  Having it your way has some hefty hidden drawbacks.

A mixture of engagingly-presented information, object lessons, and advice about how to incorporate optimal delay into your own life, Wait is not to be missed.

Wait: The Art and Science of Delay
Frank Partnoy
New York: PublicAffairs, 2012

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Why You Should Read Drive

Book Reviews / Productivity

This is not the book for anyone wanting a quick hit of external motivation to reach a short-term goal. Daniel H. Pink disdains the easy ways out of carrots and sticks, grades and monetary incentives. Instead, Drive details the theory and implementation of what he calls “Motivation 3.0,” where the reward is the task itself—as long as we can turn the work into play by doing it how, when, and with whom we want, as well as work toward mastery of a skill while we do. Oh, and don’t forget: The work better be meaningful, too.

Sound like a tall order? Compared to the traditional motivators like bonuses and certificates, it is, but as Pink argues, it may be the only way to keep ourselves and the people around us engaged in our increasingly creative and self-directed work lives. For Pink, the three great motivators are autonomy, mastery, and purpose, all of which must come from inside us rather than be imposed by others. In this slim volume, he gives the reader lucid explanations of what he means by each term, evidence for why it matters drawn from psychological and case studies, and examples of its implementation in the real world. These include “20 percent time” at companies like Google and 3M, which gives employees greater autonomy over their tasks and time, or hospital cleaning staff who seek out new areas of mastery like chatting with patients to make their hospital stay less frightening.

Pink’s tips for turning your “Type X” (extrinsically motivated) self or workplace into a “Type I” (intrinsically motivated) one run the gamut from simple to complex. At one end, there’s asking yourself each day if you came closer to mastery of a skill than the day before. At the other, it’s implementing something like Netflix’s vacation non-policy, where the only rule is that employees get their work done, and otherwise can take whatever time off they want.

Pink also explains, again with extensive reference to clinical studies, how mixing external rewards/punishments and internal motivation frequently backfires, as with a Swedish study that showed fewer people donated blood when they were paid to do so. On the other hand, he acknowledges that for routine tasks that don’t involve altruism or require much creative thinking, where people must only “race down an obvious path, the carrot waiting for them at the finish line encourage[s] them to gallop faster.” While he urges readers to follow his methods, Pink has a refreshing lack of myopia about his subject material.drive

While it isn’t a quick fix, this is the book for anyone wanting to learn—or remind themselves—what really drives us all, so that with even a few tweaks, work can become more fulfilling, successful, and even fun.

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
Daniel H. Pink
New York: Riverhead Books, 2009

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Excellent Read for the Optimistic Academic: Give and Take by Adam Grant

Book Reviews

give-and-takeAdam Grant’s New York Times Best Seller Give and Take has been heralded by Daniel Pink as “A rare work that will shatter your assumptions about how the world works and keep your brain firing for weeks after you turned the last page.” As a brain scientist, I can pretty much guarantee that unless you’re dead, your brain will be firing with or without this awesome book, BUT Grant absolutely delivers for despondent scientists and physicians who are under increasing pressures to produce, turn away from mentoring others and focus on the bottom lines of getting grants and seeing more patients.

If you are angst-ridden that your idealism may not survive the business of health care and diminishing rewards for training young minds in science and medicine, race to your library now and get this book. 

Grant takes a traditional business read narrative of telling multiple stories of individuals who were on similar trajectories yet made radically different decisions. By identifying individuals with very similar backgrounds and potential, Grant puts forth their successes and picks up on a common theme where one group of individuals feels tired, bored and listless with the status quo and another moves to the next level within their chosen field.

One of the underlying themes of Grant’s book is the juxtaposition of Peacocks and Pandas he sets up in Chapter 2. You should probably take a brief moment to look at the cute little  inset beside this and do a self-assessment of things you value at this point. I’ll be right here when you get back. I’m kidding. I’m not here. I already wrote this thing. Are you back? List A folks, or ‘peacocks’ are exceptionally good at garnering power, pulling in media attention to their business and themselves and often times they give generously of their wealth. They also dedicate themselves, often ruthlessly, to understanding ‘the score’…. how many favors they have given and to whom with the expectation that they can call upon the recipient of these favors to help them in the future.

Pandas need not be sworn to a life of  poverty and philanthropy.  Grant cites many examples of highly successful individuals who were very wealthy and ‘turning panda’ required them to know and use their understanding of business, politics, medicine and education infrastructure to advance. Based upon their experience and success, almost all of these stories involve taking brave steps outside of what could have brought even more wealth and power and choosing to do something that felt moral, immediate and involved mentoring others or providing platforms for their growth. These ‘pandas’ had nothing to gain from these, but in interviews provided by Grant, these leaders generally didn’t consider themselves brave in as much as they felt some combination of fustrated, bored, dissatisfied or useless.

As reader, I’m more than a bit cynical about business books written by rich white men for white men who want to be rich. But Grant doesn’t just deal in the rare air of the 1%. He presents practical steps for teachers, parents and families to take their lives to the next level by giving of themselves. Advice from social scientists Sonja Lyubomirsky who found that people felt more rewarded for longer periods of time by dedicating a day of service than small acts of service. That in depth giving experiences allowed pandas and want to be pandas to be present, recharged and focused on the tasks and challenges at hand for whomever they served in ways that more simple acts of kindness did not.

If these things are insufficient to motivate you to read the fast moving prose of Give and Take, maybe the Simpsons will be. Because, as with all great books, there are ample examples drawn from Simpsons episodes.

Disclosure: We didn’t even get a free book to review this one. 

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Lessons in Leadership: Why You Should Read Colin Powell’s It Worked For Me

Book Reviews / Management & Leadership

it-worked-for-meFormer Secretary of State Colin Powell offers leadership advice through storytelling in this collection of anecdotes and true tales.  Each short chapter derives a lesson from an incident encountered in his military and political service, and occasionally from private life.  Often chatty and rarely preachy, the text is as enjoyable as it is informative.

An admitted people person, Powell’s advice concentrates largely on motivating, respecting, and taking care of “the troops,” which he notes can be anything from an Army platoon to sales managers, students to family members (or research assistants!).  He sums up his guiding principle early on: “Kindness connects you with other human beings in a bond of mutual respect.  If you care for your followers and show them kindness, they will reciprocate and care for you.  They will not let you down or let you fail.  They will accomplish whatever you have put in front of them.”  At the same time, he advises, don’t neglect your own development, because “Troops—followers—will only go up the hill for leaders who have character, integrity, and moral and physical courage.”

One of Powell’s specific lessons hinges on the importance of mutual respect.  He illustrates this with several stories, including one about his stint as a battalion commander in Korea in the 1970s.  Because he had laid the groundwork by knowing his soldiers (through talking to them and by keeping a notebook of observations on each one’s performance, conduct, ambitions, strengths, and weaknesses), socializing with them, and earning their trust, when he had to drag them to a pointless lecture on extremely short notice, he heard this from a subordinate: “The troops are fine.  They know you needed them there and you would never have come up with such a nutty thing.  They are with you.”

There’s also the lesson to examine solutions with an eye to the secondary effects rather than just the immediate payoff, embodied in a half-baked idea to install beer machines in Army barracks to keep DUIs down.  Powell writes that he was for the idea (if only to quell the “bitching” from the troops who wanted the machines right then) until a sergeant pointed out that “putting machines in the barracks won’t end the bitching.  They’ll just start to bitch about the brand of beer in the machines, except they will be drunk when they bitch.”

Those are only two of the many stories and lessons included in the book.  Powell’s wit, sometimes gentle and other times trenchant, makes this essential leadership book both fun and funny.

It Worked for Me: Lessons in Life and Leadership
Colin Powell with Tony Koltz
New York: Harper-Collins, 2012

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Where Good Ideas Come From

Book Reviews / Faculty Life

Which do you think would help the germ of a thought grow into a brilliant idea: Talking about it with others, who have their own sparkling thoughts and brilliant ideas, and recombining the best parts of each to make them as strong as possible; or locking it away without sunlight and water?  If you chose the first option, you’ve stumbled on to Steven Johnson’s central argument: “we are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them.”

Openness and connectivity, he asserts, are the defining features of idea- and innovation-rich environments, from a coral reef that provides a perfect environment for the innovation of evolution; to big cities that somehow encourage residents to be not only more creative than residents of smaller locales, but exponentially more creative; and even to offices that embrace openness through architecture that makes communication easier, or which encourage more discussion between co-workers.

Johnson develops his thesis across seven chapters which range in focus from serendipity to hunch development to “the adjacent possible,” or what can be created with the spare parts and ideas already at hand, rather than attempting to innovate without a platform to stand on.  (For example, as he writes, “Four billion years ago, if you were a carbon atom, there were a few hundred molecular configurations you could stumble into.  Today that same carbon atom, whose atomic properties haven’t changed one single nanogram, can help build a sperm whale or a giant redwood or an H1N1 virus, along with a near-infinite list of other carbon-based life forms that were not part of the adjacent possible of prebiotic earth.”)  He uses fascinating examples to illustrate his points, such as the “hunch-killing system” in place to deal with memos at the FBI, which due to its compartmentalization of information may have prevented agents from putting evidence together in time to prevent the World Trade Center attacks of September 11th; or MIT’s Building 20, where an unexpectedly high number of scientific and technological breakthroughs were made in part because, Johnson and others theorize, its origin as a temporary structure made it easy to knock down walls, rearrange rooms, and otherwise alter the interior space to accommodate new groupings of people and ideas, allowing as much connection as possible.

Ultimately, you’re responsible for your own good ideas, but reading this book will give you the food to help them grow.

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation
Steven Johnson
New York: Riverhead, 2010

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Prevent the Email Faux Pas That Gets You Fired: Read Send

Book Reviews / Communication

Did you know that signing an email with “Sincerely” instead of “Best regards” can irrevocably alter your relationship with a colleague?  Or that “please” and “thank you” can be anything but polite?

send-largeAlthough it’s now almost five years old, Send remains an invaluable guide to emailing appropriately to staff, superiors, friends and relatives.  Oh, and with advice like “If you’re working with weasels, watch their e-mails like a hawk,” it’s pretty funny, too.

Authors David Shipley and Will Schwalbe divide the book into seven chapters and an introduction, each focused on topics such as when emails (versus phone calls or personal meetings) are most appropriate and useful; the “anatomy” of an email, from when it’s best to Cc, to how to put information and requests in the most readable formats, to how to convey different tones in greetings and sign-offs; and how to keep from landing in trouble, with advice on how to avoid both potential legal issues and on word choice or sentence constructions that give the wrong impression to your recipient.

With well-defined sections, bullet points, and sidebars, the book packs a ton of information into an easily-perusable format.  Curious how to make your subject lines more informative (and the message more likely to be read)?  Check out the section—and examples—on page 80.  Not sure who to Cc that important message to (and why it matters so much)?  Page 64 is your friend.  Want a guide to making email requests that get a favorable response?  The section starting on page 143 is here to help.

In the introduction, the authors give one of their most important general guidelines: “If you don’t consciously insert tone into an email, a kind of universal default tone won’t automatically be conveyed.  Instead, the message written without regard to tone becomes a blank screen onto which the reader projects his own fears, prejudices, and anxieties.”  If you want to give your colleagues, buddies, and everyone else you email the best possible impression of you and your words, start with this book.

Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better
By David Shipley and Will Schwalbe
New York: Vintage, 2007

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Do More Great Work

Book Reviews / Productivity

Ever wish you had a map to show you how to avoid unnecessary busywork and focus on the work you know you were meant to do?  In this jam-packed little volume, Michael Bungay Stanier gives you just such a map–fifteen of them, in fact.  His starting premise, that “busy” is not a measure of success, gives him (and you!) latitude to take time working through the maps to find your “Great Work” and make it happen.  And the maps require a fair amount of work, as they’re mostly blank with instructions on how to fill them in according to your own likes, dislikes, work habits, and ideas.   (Got a library copy?  The maps are available for free at the author’s website.)

As well as maps that help you determine your which of your many great ideas should be your Great Work and how to go about doing it, the book is stuffed with short essays on related topics like not settling for Good Work when you could be doing Great Work (73), “How to Say No When You Can’t Say No” (90), and the virtues of laziness (85).  As Stanier writes, “Lazy people are often extremely efficient, because they look for the fastest, easiest way of doing things.”

Boring tasks getting in the way of your real work?  Stanier has tips to make them go away, or at least go faster.  The combination of visually-oriented map templates and inset text  from multiple prominent business authors and bloggers makes it easy to work through the book at an individual pace, especially for those of us with short attention spa–ooh, a bunny!  (Sorry.)Most importantly, working through the book forces you to articulate your ideas and determine specific actions to take that will turn them into reality, even if these steps will upset the proverbial applecart.  After all, “[i]f everyone’s happy, then you’re not doing Great Work.”  Take the time.  Do the maps.  Find your purpose.

Do More Great Work
Michael Bungay Stanier
New York: Workman Publishing, 2010

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