Stand Still Like the Hummingbird

Henry Miller

“And your way, is it really your way?

[…]

What, moreover, can you call your own? The house you live in, the food you swallow, the clothes you wear — you neither built the house nor raised the food nor made the clothes.

[…]

The same goes for your ideas. You moved into them ready-made.”

A Technique for Producing Ideas: The simple, five-step formula anyone can use to be more creative in business and in life!

James Web Youn

“…the habit of mind which leads to a search for relationships between facts becomes of the highest importance in the production of ideas.”

James Webb Young’s timeless five-step guide to producing ideas, originally written in 1939.

Free Radicals: The Secret Anarchy of Science

Michael Brooks

The story of scientific rule-breakers, the men and women who experimented on themselves, had fantastic visions and unexplainable hunches, and took once-in-a-lifetime risks, all in the name of pursuing curiosity.

Magic Hours: Essays on Creators and Creation

Tom Bissell

“To create anything… is to believe, if only momentarily, you are capable of magic.”

Abstract City

Christoph Niemann

The collected visual essays of Christoph Niemann, blending quirky humor with keen insight into the human condition to explore everything from his love-hate relationship with coffee to the fall of the Berlin Wall to his obsession with maps to the familiar drudgery of red-eye flights.

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

Jon Gertner

At the turn of the twentieth century, Thomas Edison was the most famous inventor in the world. He hoarded useful materials, from rare metals to animal bones, and through careful, methodical testing, he made his new inventions work, and previous inventions work better. Churning out patent after patent, Edison’s particular form of innovation was about the what, and not about the how — the latter he could outsource and hire for.

“In 1910, few Americans knew the difference between a scientist, an engineer, and an inventor” explains Jon Gertner at the beginning of his lively book about a place that fostered a home for all three, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation.

Imagine: How Creativity Works

Jonah Lehrer

“Creativity shouldn’t be seen as something otherworldly. It shouldn’t be thought of as a process reserved for artists and inventors and other ‘creative types.’ The human mind, after all, has the creative impulse built into its operating system, hard-wired into its most essential programming code. At any given moment, the brain is automatically forming new associations, continually connecting an everyday x to an unexpected y.”

Jonah Lehrer on how creativity really works and why most of the assumptions we hold about it aren’t just wrong but also detrimental to our own capacity to create.

Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative

Austin Kleon

Some time ago, artist and writer Austin Kleon — one of my favorite thinkers, a keen observer of and participant in the creative economy of the digital age — was invited to give a talk to students, the backbone for which was a list of 10 things he wished he’d heard as a young creator.

So widely did the talk resonate that Kleon decided to deepen and enrich its message in Steal Like an Artist — an intelligent and articulate manifesto for the era of combinatorial creativity and remix culture.

Kleon goes on to delineate the qualities you’ll need to cultivate for the creative life — things like kindness, curiosity, “productive procrastination,” “a willingness to look stupid” — demonstrating that “creativity” isn’t some abstract phenomenon bestowed upon the fortunate few but, rather, a deliberate mindset and pragmatic ethos we can architect for ourselves. As he puts it, “you are a mashup of what you let into your life.”

Proust Was a Neuroscientist

Jonah Lehrer

Jonah Lehrer tells the story of how a handful of iconic creators each discovered an essential truth about the mind long before modern science was able to label and pinpoint it — for instance, George Eliot detected neuroplasticity, Gertrude Stein uncovered the deep structure of language, Cézanne fathomed how vision works, and Proust demonstrated the imperfections of memory.

At the heart of the message is what Lehrer calls a “fourth culture” that empowers us to “freely transplant knowledge between the sciences and the humanities, and focus on connecting the reductionist fact to our actual experience.”

Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

David Lipsky

In early 1996, journalist David Lipsky 34-year-old David Foster Wallace on the last leg of his tour for his breakout novel, Infinite Jest for an ambitious Rolling Stone interview. The feature was never published, but in 2010, some 14 years after the road trip and two years after Wallace’s suicide, Lipsky released the transcript in the profound, wildly revealing Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace.

Distrust That Particular Flavor

William Gibson

“We [are] shaped as writers, I believe, not much by who our favorite writers are as by our general experience of fiction. Learning to write fiction, we learn to listen for our own acquired sense of what feels right, based on the totality of the pleasure (or its lack) that fiction has provided us. Not direct emulation, but rather a matter of a personal micro-culture.”

What personal micro-culture are you cultivating?

Henry Miller on Writing

Henry Miller

“When you can’t create you can work.” Henry Miller’s 11 commandments of writing and his daily creative routine.

Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning

Gary Marcus

A neuroscientist debunks the myth of a “music instinct” and learns to play – a fascinating journey into the limits of human reinvention.