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Mittwoch, 27. März 2019

In Praise of the ‘How To’ Creativity Workbook / Evan James. In: Lit Hub March 27, 2019

When I was a teenager, I bought a book—at the Barnes & Noble at the Kitsap Mall in Silverdale, Washington—called How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci.
I had eccentric reading habits back then, at least viewed from the vantage point of my current reading routines, which are more appropriate to someone who writes novels and essays. I didn’t care that much about books. I liked to play tennis and basketball, play the card game Magic: The Gathering and the miniature tabletop wargame Warhammer, smoke weed and play music with my friends, and either write setting descriptions for a text-based online role-playing game called Dragon’s Gate or curiously prowl around the “m4m” chatrooms I could access all of a sudden through AOL on the family computer.
How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci rode in on a wave of books in the “bestselling tradition” of The Artist’s Way. Books that offered a programmatic approach to mining your full creative potential. That seemed a lot more exciting to me than whatever I was doing at school, which I rejected in the way only an authority-hating teenager can: I craved rules, regulations, and programs but resented any actual flesh-and-blood person trying to impose them on me. I longed to cultivate my potential in private, away from the judgments of the adult world—a world, it goes without saying, that could not be trusted.
A romance with workbooks was born. Whether carrying out da Vincian exercises meant to strengthen “the essential elements of genius, from curiosità, the insatiably curious approach to life, to connessione, the appreciation for the interconnectedness of all things” or developing an abundance mentality as recommended by The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, it all felt very active, like I was doing something for myself, thinking about what mattered in life. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/in-praise-of-the-how-to-creativity-workbook/

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