Spring is a season of growth. With warmer weather, brighter colors, and longer days, it’s a great time to support the creative mind. Here’s a Spring reading list to spark creativity in 2022.
What are your spring habits to support creativity? Do you spend more time outside in nature? Do you travel to relax and experience new things? What about starting new healthy habits to get in shape and support a healthier and happier lifestyle? One habit that can support all of these is reading, and this spring, there are a ton of new books coming out to support and inspire the creative mind.
How Creativity Rules the World: The Art and Business of Turning Your Ideas into Gold by Maria Brito, an award-winning New York-based contemporary art advisor, author, and curator, is releasing her first book about cultivating habits, actions, and attitudes that inspire creativity and foster innovation.
Creativity is the key to innovation in any business. How Creativity Rules the World shows that, despite contrary beliefs, creativity is an inexhaustible resource that can be learned by anyone. This guide promises to make the creative process of billion-dollar entrepreneurs and successful seven-figure artists accessible and actionable for you.
Learn How To:
- Overcome limiting thoughts and dispel myths about creativity.
- Understand creativity through concrete data, historical passages, and examples of modern entrepreneurship.
- Develop timeless habits, principles, and tools that worked six centuries ago and continue to work today.
- Employ creativity in an everyday context to produce extraordinary results.
In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing by Elena Ferrante, the author of seven novels, including four New York Times bestsellers, is bringing another guaranteed classic that’s already one of the most anticipated books in 2022.
Here, in these four crisp essays, Ferrante offers a rare look at the origins of her literary powers. She writes about her influences, her struggles, and her formation as both a reader and a writer; she describes the perils of “bad language” and suggests ways in which it has long excluded women’s truth; she proposes a choral fusion of feminine talent as she brilliantly discourses on the work of Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Ingeborg Bachmann, and many others.
Emotion By Design: Creative Leadership Lessons from a Life at Nike by Greg Hoffman, a global brand leader and former NIKE Chief Marketing Officer, shares lessons and stories on the power of creativity drawn from almost three decades of experience within Nike.
A celebration of ingenuity and a call-to-arms for brand-builders to rediscover the human element in forming consumer bonds, EMOTION BY DESIGN is an insider’s guide to unlocking inspiration within a brand and building stronger emotional connections with consumers.
Learn Hoffman’s three favorite guiding principles:
- Creativity is a Team Sport
- Dare to be Remembered
- Leave a Legacy, Not Just a Memory
With fascinating stories about Nike’s most famous campaigns, EMOTION BY DESIGN shares Hoffman’s philosophy and principles on how to create an empowering brand that resonates deeply with people by unlocking the creativity within your organization and unleashing it out into the world.
12 Notes: On Life and Creativity by Quincy Jones is a self-development guide that will affirm that creativity is a calling that can and should be answered, no matter your age or experience.
Quincy Jones shares wisdom and musings on creativity and life from one of the world’s most beloved musicians, producers, and mentors. Drawing from his own life and those of his many creative collaborators past and present, Quincy Jones presents readers with lessons that are hardworking and accessible yet speak to the passion of self-expression.
He includes sections as deep as how to transform grief into power and as practical as to how to set goals and articulate intentions through daily affirmations. Weaving his story throughout, Jones lets readers in on his own creative process, as well as the importance of letting honesty, hard work, and good relationships drive your career.
Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau by Ben Shattuck, a former Teaching-Writing Fellow, and director of Cuttyhunk Island Writers’ Residency, shares a reminder of how transformative walking in nature can be for the creative mind. Intimate, entertaining, and beautifully crafted, Six Walks is a resounding tribute to the ways walking in nature can inspire us all.
On an autumn morning in 1849, Henry David Thoreau stepped out his front door to walk the beaches of Cape Cod. Over a century and a half later, Ben Shattuck does the same. With little more than a loaf of bread, brick of cheese, and a notebook, Shattuck sets out to retrace Thoreau’s path through the Cape’s outer beaches, from the elbow to Provincetown’s fingertip.
This is the first of six journeys taken by Shattuck, each one inspired by a walk once taken by Henry David Thoreau. After the Cape, Shattuck goes up Mount Katahdin and Mount Wachusett, down the coastline of his hometown, and then through the Allagash. Along the way, Shattuck encounters unexpected characters, landscapes, and stories, seeing for himself the restorative effects that walking can have on a dampened spirit. Over years of following Thoreau, Shattuck finds himself uncovering new insights about family, love, friendship, and fatherhood and understanding more deeply the lessons walking can offer through life’s changing seasons.
Things That Matter: Overcoming Distraction to Pursue a More Meaningful Life by Joshua Becker, the founder, and editor of Becoming Minimalist, shares practical steps you can take today to live a life focused on things that matter.
Do you want to live a meaningful life—with very few regrets—and make a positive difference in the world? But is culture distracting you from doing so? Perhaps moments, days, and years go by without you stopping to ask yourself, Am I living out my true purpose? Even if that question whispers to you, are you brushing it aside because you don’t know what to change in life’s busyness?
In Things That Matter, Joshua Becker helps you identify the obstacles—such as fear, technology, money, possessions, and the opinions of others—that keep you from living with intention, and then he provides practical ideas for letting go of those distractions today so you can focus on what matters most. He uses practical exercises and questions, insights from a nationwide survey, and success stories to give you the motivation you need to:
- Identify the pursuits that matter most to you
- Align your dreams with your daily priorities
- Recognize how money and possessions keep you from happiness
- Become aware of how others’ opinions of you influence your choices
- Embrace what you’re truly passionate about instead of planning that next escape
- Figure out what to do with all those emails, notifications, and pings
- Let go of past mistakes and debilitating habits
How do we get to the end of our lives with minimal regrets? We set aside lesser pursuits to seek lasting meaning. And we discover the joy of doing it every day.
The High Sierra by Kim Stanley Robinson, a sci-fi author and winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards, takes a break from fiction to share his passion and love for the Sierra Nevadas.
Kim Stanley Robinson first ventured into the Sierra Nevada mountains during the summer of 1973. He returned from that encounter a changed man, awed by a landscape that made him feel as if he were simultaneously strolling through an art museum and scrambling on a jungle gym like an energized child. He has returned to the mountains throughout his life—more than a hundred trips—and has gathered a vast store of knowledge about them. The High Sierra is his lavish celebration of this exceptional place and an exploration of what makes this span of mountains one of the most compelling and inspiring places on Earth.
Zach is an international writer, photographer, filmmaker, martial artist, and creator of Creative Enso, the Zen art of creative living. His goal is to empower and inspire creatives to live healthier, happier, and more creative lifestyles.
