![FLOW - THE PSYCHOLOGY OF OPTIMAL EXPERIENCE [or ENGAGEMENT WITH ORDINARY LIFE]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55c77a9ae4b0760916a638b9/1573379015753-S82OALR2SW2CURTMM7QE/4_FLOW.jpg)
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THE TALENT CODE
‘The Talent Code’ is a keeper for the next generation and the starting point for ours! Why ? Well, the author’s ‘talent hotbeds’, which are centres of a certain kind of excellence, might as well be ‘innovation hotbeds’ or ‘meditation centres’ by a different name. There’s tonnes of fantastic stories here, like why the best female golfers come from Korea, the best soccer players from Brazil. And overall, Coyle puts together a recipe for the biological, psychological, sociological & altruistic factors that do and must co-exist, for talent and creativity to thrive in hidden corners. One insight alone is worth the price of the book - that our brain can biologically time travel to enable creative miracles to happen, when it has been given enough discipline and nurture to support them.
OUTLIERS
I could read this book over and over. And I do! Everyone knows Gladwell is a master storyteller. But how does it help us understand creativity? Well, because it’s about the exceptions to the norm - the bits of the bell curve of life that everyone ignores until they change the world. ‘Outliers’ might as well be a synonym for disruptive innovation. But what we can thankfully learn from Gladwell is that changing the world is not just about individual luck, talent or perseverance. We need to be born in the right environment, at the right time and place, and in a culture whose values profoundly inspire us to act. And if we can take account of these, it might turbo-boost our courage to change things & give us serenity to persevere in the face of inevitable disappointments.
Creativity Inc.
This is the perfect followup to ‘Outliers’. For here we can see all Gladwell’s principles in action - and in one case, prove him wrong. This is a wonderful human-centred account of what it takes to grow a creative enterprise from the ground-up, before anyone believes in it, through management nightmare to the kind of community everyone loves to love. Pixar’s president & book author, Ed Catmull, doesn’t gloss over the challenges of making that happen. The book includes plenty of actionable gems and my favourite insight into the legendarily persuasive Steve Jobs, who is tellingly impacted for the better as a human being, through being involved in Pixar’s evolving culture. This is the ‘Gone With The Wind’ of business non-fiction, a must-have inspiration for anyone who wants to lead their own creative technical community.
FLOW - THE PSYCHOLOGY OF OPTIMAL EXPERIENCE [or ENGAGEMENT WITH ORDINARY LIFE]
This book, on ‘The Psychology of Optimal Experience’ [and Csikzentmihalyi’s two related works, ‘Flow - The Psychology of Happiness’ with the white cover and ‘Creativity - The Psychology of Discovery & Invention’ with the red cover] is an absolute classic. I chose it for our club because as far as the author is concerned, happiness, creativity & ‘flow’ [a word Csikzentmihalyi invented, by the way] are totally interrelated - plus this is the easiest of his works to read. So what do you need to know about Flow? It’s where we want to be, permanently. It’s ‘the zone’ or magical state of mind where we’re so completely absorbed in a challenge at the edge of our ability, that nothing else seems to matter. And it’s where our experience transcends the rules and we feel like a game has nothing to do with us, as if a tennis ball hits itself over the net. This is the book that lays out all the rules for how this happens in our daily lives merging both discipline and a gameful attitude.
THE COMPASSIONATE ACHIEVER
Now on to the deeper question about why we have any motivation to create or recreate or innovate at all. This book is our first, simple pointer to an answer - compassion. Both by Buddha’s and Kukk’s definition, it’s because we care about someone else’s pain and make a commitment to help that we become greater than we currently are. Indeed, Kukk provides plenty of scientific evidence to prove that ‘looking out for number one’ is not the secret to success. By acting from a position of abundance or surplus and putting the needs of others first, we don’t become doormats. Rather we receive intrinsic & extrinsic benefits ranging from increased resiliency to failure, to improved relationships, to higher intelligence. In wanting to help others, we’re better able to see the right problems to solve, better able to avoid dead ends, and better able to find the best answers together.
THE SCIENCE OF ALTRUISM
This is the first heavyweight in our club, just in time for the Aussie summer. It takes our understanding of personal responsibility to the next level, defining empathy, compassion, altruism, heroism & love not as poetry or theory, but firm, proven neuroscientific fact. The book is, on the one hand a plea - to not only make a choice to ‘walk in the light of creative altruism rather the darkness of destructive selfishness’ [as Martin Luther King Jr. put it] but to actually cultivate altruism as a skill. Happily, as Ricard adds Buddhist wisdom to the picture, it becomes possible to do this and see his compelling global vision for the 21st century. As said, this is not a super easy read but, I believe, a necessary one for our club, so we can help the ‘Altruism Revolution’ that’s already started in the world to flourish and sustain all the innovative economic, political & environmental solutions we find, in the long term.
Buy as ‘The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and The World’ on Amazon USA
DARING GREATLY
After we know the grand scale and science of compassion, we still need to put it in practise and must start where we are. Without the benefit of religious insight, our best bet is probably this one - being courageously vulnerable. Brene Brown’s newly famous work reminds us what it feels like, for many people, to start from the opposite end of compassion, the place where we cannot be open to help others because we’re too scared to be seen ourselves. I would call this ‘not daring to be fully human’. And that keeps us from our dreams because we feel as if we are failures, not just that we have failed. This title links nicely with our previous books, for allowing human imperfection and vulnerability in ourselves and others is also the place that allows us to achieve our dreams as leaders - vulnerability is perhaps nothing other then the ability to be compassionate with others as a result of feeling our own perpetual suffering.
START WITH WHY
Simon Sinek’s new classic is another must-read. For if we want to change the world, we need a strong direction and a large vision and we need to state both clearly. Sinek points out that this has been true of leaders throughout history. And because our bookclub is here to support creative leaders, not just creativity, we need to pay fresh attention. This title is focussed on business, but there is no reason just to treat it as business. After all, in a century where Western education has focussed on churning out scientists and business people who can apparently explain all ‘what’ exists in our lives, we have created an epidemic of depression because people do not know the deep reason ‘why’ anything really exists in their lives. Sinek’s Golden Circle framework is a good reminder to reframe our lives from that point, ‘from the inside out’ instead of the outside in.
ENCHANTMENT
Enchantment has always been a favourite word of mine. And the way Kawasaki uses it in this book, it’s not tarnished. For he argues that in business and personal interaction, the goal should not be to manipulate or merely get what you want but to evince a voluntary, durable and delightful change in others. It sounds like magic, that people might do our silent bidding, and fulfil our secret wishes, doesn’t it ? And yes, Kawasaki is a businessman and the book is about business, in the end. But still, as Bodhisattvas, we can read a quasi-spiritual truth in it, where by being likable, kind and trustworthy, and by explaining our own cause in a way that shows others they’re already on the same journey inside the same dream, we can stop wars [yes, he tells a story of this], help more Davids slay more Goliaths [more stories] and generally change hearts, minds, and actions for the greater good.
THE CULTURE CODE
Another Daniel Coyle book - because his first was so good ! In this one, he turns his investigation inside out, to ask what supports teams & cultures, instead of individuals. And true to the latin origin of ‘cultus’ meaning ‘care’, he tells us that a sustainable culture results from leaders creating a container for three critical skills that prove they care: [1] Safety— showing enough overt signals of bonding, belonging & shared identity that others feel they can be vulnerable [2] Vulnerability— sharing as a mutual risk that drives trusting cooperation and produces a positive feedback loop [3] Stories of shared purpose, goals & values [‘A Why’] that bridges safety and vulnerability. These points are well-hidden in another bunch of great stories, so we can again learn and remember by example not theory.
THINKERTOYS
If you’re working with my Inspiration Cards or Innovation Map, you might think you don’t need any more creativity tools. But we can never have enough tricks up our sleeve to help clients get the results they pay us for! Besides, they’re fantastic brain training for you too. If my memory serves me correctly, Michalko collected this set while he was working for the US military, and they’re still the most comprehensive kit on the market. I surveyed each and every one of them in my original research on the fundamental patterns of creative thinking and this book covers almost the whole spectrum of thinking styles. When we get here, I’ll give you a taxonomy of tools to put this lot together with my Innovation Map and your powers of creation will be unstoppable!
LOONSHOTS
We could say that ‘Loonshots’ is a competitor to Malcolm Gladwell’s fantastic ‘Tipping Point’. But it also adds something extra - the perspective of a physicist, management consultant & biotech entrepreneur, obsessed with organizational structure - and that’s in the person of the single author. Suffice to say, Bahcall’s perspective is simultaneously interdisciplinary and radically myopic. But his point is, that innovation is too - and I agree. So here we are, with a book that confronts us to find the non-dual balancing point that enables both efficiency and execution [which are bad for innovation] and intrinsic messiness and inefficiency [which is, vice versa, disruptive to the status quo]. For me, the most important insight of all is that we must ask the right questions of the right person in the right situation to find that point.