The Accidental Creative: How to Be Brilliant at a Moment's Notice

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Maintaining focus during a career is not easy. Todd Henry provides practical guidelines to do so. I'll address just a few of his guidelines.

Before reading his book, I felt that the three main limiting factors in life and career were time, money and energy. Of the three, I thought that time was the largest constraint. Mr. Henry argues that energy, and its preservation and deployment, is the constraint that requires the most careful consideration. While considering his arguments, I found them persuasive.

He further contends that separation of career and personal life is a false dichotomy. Each aspect of one's life requires time, money and energy. Since these resources are limited, expenditures in one area of one's life, whether career or personal, limits the availability of these resources for deployment into other areas of one's life. The book considers the necessity of balancing one's personal life and career. This is a challenge that I, and I suspect many others, experience regularly.

The author argues that what one puts into your life affects the creative potential of what you will be able to produce. Or, to put it another way, what goes in will heavily affect what comes out of your career endeavors. He argues for pursuing broader intellectual interests as this might allow unexpected creative insights.

A certain amount of courage is required to avoid mediocrity. Inherently, risk accompanies traveling unfamiliar paths. Read the book to understand the author's mantra of "die empty."

I would not generally be considered a creative, but I found the author's approach readily applicable to the career that I have pursued. I found his suggestions and arguments, which are far more than I have discussed above, to be thoughtful and provocative. Many business books consist of 20-30 pages of useful material repeated 5 or 6 times (or more) with some variation in the information presented so there are 150 or more pages so the publisher has a book and not a magazine article to publish. Mr. Henry avoids this fault, provides useful guideposts for life and career and for these reasons I assigned 5 stars to the book. I encourage you to read it..