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29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Useful book that helps you unleash your creativity, March 6, 2002
I must admit to being a big Michael Gelb fan . . . I've heard him
speak (he is great!), and I loved his previous book: HOW TO
THINK LIKE LEONARDO DA VINCI . . . so naturally, when
his latest effort (DISCOVER YOUR GENIUS: HOW TO THINK
LIKE HISTORY'S TEN MOST REVOLUTIONARY MINDS) became
available, I tore into it--and was not disappointed . . . it is equally great! Imagine being able to draw upon the collected wisdom of Plato,
Brunelleschi, Columbus, Copernicus, Elizabeth I, Shakespeare,
Jefferson, Darwin, Gandhi, and Einstein . . . Gelb
looks at these great thinkers to help you unleash your own
creavity . . . each of the invididuals profiled embodies a
special "genius" charactersitic, ranging from
optimism to courage . . . you then get to integrate these principles
into your daily life through a series of self-assessment questionnaires
and a complete program of practical exercises. There were many memorable passages; among them:
[on how to read a Shakespeare play]
Each Shakespeare play offers a master class in emotional
intelligence and the lack thereof. As you read each play
approach it with the following questions in mind:
What can I learn from this play that will help me know myself better?
What can I learn from this play that will help me understand others better?
(It's useful to think of specific people you might wish to
understand better.) [Thomas Jefferson's ten-point plan for personal improvement]
1. Never put off til tomorrow what you can do today. (Jefferson rose
before sunrise each day to get a head start on his massive to-do lists.) 2. Never trouble another for what you can do yourself. (Jefferson
believed in the spirit of personal as well as political independence
and thought that it began with the ability to solve one's own problems.) 3. Never spend your money before you have it. (Jefferson learned
this the hard way by violating this advice repeatedly and suffering
the consequences.) 4. Never buy what you do not want because it is cheap; it will be
dear to you. (Jefferson loved life and saw material objects as means
to experience rather than ends in themselves.) 5. Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst and cold. (At the center
of power for many years, Jefferson witnessed the disastrous
effects of egotism and believing one's own publicity on many
powerful people.) 6. We never repent of having eaten too little. (Jefferson's
extraordinary vitality was in part a function of his healthy diet and
his practice of leaving the table before he was full.) 7. Nothing is troublesome that we do willingly. (As a natural
optimist, Jefferson was able to choose to see the best in all life's
circumstances. This was his way of saying, "To get what you
choose, choose what you've got.") 8. How much pain has cost us the evils which have never
happened. (Jefferson reminds us that worry is pointless. His
optimism helped protect him from anxiety about the future.) 9. Take things away by their smooth handle. (Jefferson was an
elegant mind with a talent for finding the path of least resistance.) 10. When angry, count ten before you speak; if very angry, a
hundred. (As a man of the Enlightenment, Jefferson championed
the voice of reason and understood the great power of words to
cause harm as well as good.) [an exercise to help you think like Einstein]
In your notebook or on a piece of scrap paper, take two minutes
and write down as many uses as you possibly can for a paper clip. How many uses did you write down? Take the total number of
answers and divide by two to calculate your score in terms
of uses-per-minute. The international average score is four uses per minute. A score of
eight is excellent and a score of twelve or more correlates
significantly with other genius-level measures of idea generation
ability. Does the alternate use test creativity? Not really. It tests one's
comfort with free association, and free association is an important
aspect of the creative process.
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by Michael J. Gelb
by Ronald Gross
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