Book Review: ''Creative Confidence'' - Unleash Your Creativity

Book Review: ''Creative Confidence'' - Unleash Your Creativity

• 5/07/2015

I've told you in other posts that I love to read novels and fiction. This time, the book I'll be recommending is neither of those, it's about Creative Confidence. That's the title of the book by the way.  

About 2 year ago, I was studying a postgraduate in Design Thinking and the teacher kept talking about this awesome company called IDEO, which is an international design and consulting firm that focuses on innovation centered in user experience. So, a year ago, I remembered about this, don't ask me why..And I started Googling it and found that their co-founders ( who are also Stanford's Design School founders ) had written a book: Creative Confidence. It also had nice reviews and I saw a TED talk that sealed the deal ( check it out below ) so I bought it and started reading something different.

Ever since we were kids, we were born creative, curious, with no fears at all. What happens when we start growing up? We start hearing things like be careful, don't do that, you can't do that, you're not creative, etc. and we start loosing that confidence in our own creativity that we were born with.

Society labels people as the creative type and the analytic type. For society, you can only pick one but in reality, we were all born creative type with the capacity to create something new in the world.

Don't expect to find like just one story of how a person became aware of their creativity. The book is not like that, it's not written like a novel. It does show a series of examples and cases of how people overcame their fears and discovered that inner creativity that was buried under worries, concerns and the fear of being judged by other people. It also provides a lot of tools on how to spark creativity, because something I learned from reading this book is that creativity must be practiced, otherwise, we fall in auto-pilot. 

One of the things I liked is that the book brings self-awareness on how we are all capable and powerful to change the world. That spark we have inside of us can unleash a creative thinking that can lead to different ideas and improve the world we live in. We just have to buy the idea that we actually can do that. Instead of just looking past at what's wrong around you, try thinking about what could be done to make it better and not just think about it, try it out! make a prototype, being creative is about trial and error, that's the only way to learn it; and just because an idea is completely different from anything else that has never been done before, doesn't mean it's not going to work. That's actually being creative and innovative. You've created something new.

I hope you like the book as much as I did. Sometimes it is good to get out of our comfort zone and read different things that can help us grow. 

Here's a link to where I bought the book in Amazon.  And here's the video I told you about:

Until next time.