Through a series of interviews of creative people, “Creativity” by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi interrogates the similarities between the character traits of creative people, and common threads of how people approach creative work.

Tharp, an accomplished and celebrated choreographer, draws on her career to share stories, prompts, and ideas about how artists can make creativity a habitual part of their lives.

I came to Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, thinking that I already knew what it was. A fairly dense, though canonical and oft-cited academic work on the psychology of the “flow state”: that rare, almost reverent state of creativity in which the practitioner is totally immersed in what they’re doing. In this “flow state,” as I…

I recently finished reading The Practice: Shipping Creative Work: the latest book from Seth Godin. In case you haven’t heard of Godin, he’s the marketing guru that famously publishes short thought-provoking blogs daily, and sends those blog posts as emails. In the book, Godin sets up the idea of creativity as a deliberate practice, one…

I picked up John Cleese’s newest book, Creativity: a short and cheerful guide, on a whim. I’ve started blogging about creativity, so it seems like a handy thing to read a book about the topic from a master comedian, right? The subtitle “a short and cheerful guide” does not overpromise. At just over 100 pages,…