Daily Creative: A Practical Guide for Staying Prolific, Brilliant, and Healthy

Henry (Herding Tigers), founder of the Accidental Creative consultancy, delivers a bland guide for finding inspiration. The author provides 365 brief pieces of advice for enhancing creativity accompanied by reflection questions (“Are you too close to any of your work right now?”) that promote discipline, inspiration, and persistence. Henry encourages readers to take their time considering new ideas: “In the moment of creative ecstasy, we sometimes lack perspective. Sit on your idea.” The author draws recommendations from personal anecdotes, telling how his neighbors’ cat passes his window every day while following an established hunting route and urging readers to establish a routine or practice that one can rely on for inspiration. Other suggestions, based on the habits of famous trailblazers, utilize biographical facts too well-known to hold hidden wisdom, as when Henry relates how Albert Einstein developed his theory of relativity while working as a patent clerk and warns readers that a job will likely not fulfill one’s creative impulses. The brevity of each section leads to shallow advice and the suggestion-per-day format results in repetition (“When things get difficult, remember this: you can do hard things”; “Persist, friend”). This by-the-numbers manual is a letdown. (Sept.)