The Power of Daily Practice: How Creative and Performing Artists (and Everyone Else) Can Finally Meet Their Goals

Maisel (Unleashing the Artist Within), a former psychotherapist, explores the benefits of understanding and creating a daily routine in this accessible guide. He begins with 20 brief chapters, each corresponding to an element he believes is crucial to maintaining a healthy daily practice—initiation , honesty, repetition, playfulness, ceremony, and self-trust among them. In part two, he explains varieties of daily practices that the reader may want to establish relating to goals of creativity, recovery, health, activism, and “business-building.” For instance, he proposes that aspiring artists establish a minimum 20-minute daily practice and, when feeling stuck, make a chart of things that inspire either love or hate. Maisel also shares anecdotes of those who have implemented practices successfully, such as one woman’s business-building practice of taking a break from her day job each morning to briefly work on her personal business and remind herself there is “more time coming.” Maisel interrupts the narrative repeatedly to direct readers to his website of personal philosophy, “kirism,” and to take jabs at the pharmaceutical industry, which he believes aids a contemporary “epidemic of restlessness.” While repetitive, this straightforward volume provides plenty of practical advice. (Sept.)