What a Great Idea! instructs readers on how to challenge and defeat widely held notions that stifle creativity. Based on his hugely successful seminars, Chic Thompson, one of the country's leading students of the creative process, promotes aggressive and visionary thinking and unleashes readers' creative processes.

All Groan Up: Searching for Self, Faith, and A Freaking Job! is the story of the GenY/Millennial generation told through the individual story of author Paul Angone. It’s a story of struggle, hope, failure, and doubts in the twilight zone of growing up and being grown, connecting with his twentysomething post-college audience with raw honesty, humor, and hope.

Today the classics of the western canon, written by the proverbial ''dead white men,'' are cannon fodder in the culture wars. But in the 1950s and 1960s, they were a pop culture phenomenon. The Great Books of Western Civilization, fifty-four volumes chosen by intellectuals at the University of Chicago, began as an educational movement, and evolved into a successful marketing idea. Why did a million American households buy books by Hippocrates and Nicomachus from door-to-door salesmen? And how and why did the great books fall out of fashion? In A Great Idea at the Time Alex Beam explores the Great Books mania, in an entertaining and strangely poignant portrait of American popular culture on the threshold of the television age. Populated with memorable characters, A Great Idea at the Time will leave readers asking themselves: Have I read Lucretius's De Rerum Natura lately? If not, why not?

How to Have Great Ideas is the essential guide for students and young professionals looking to embrace creative thinking in design, advertising and communications. It provides 53 practical strategies for unlocking innovative ideas. Strategies include improvisation techniques, changing the scenery, finding hidden links, looking to nature for inspiration, combining unusual systems, challenging set boundaries and many more. Each strategy is packed with great examples of successful contemporary and historical designs – from a designer dress made out of an old typewriter to ticket machines powered by recycled bottles in China, via the reimagining of famous brand logos and mis-use of photocopiers. Packed with practical projects to kick-start inventive thought in idea-blocked moments, this book explores creative thinking across all visual arts disciplines.

An inclusive philosophy book for the next generation of young thinkers.

The next big idea is out there—You just have to know how to spot it Creativity is crucial to business and design success. How do you unleash bursts of creativity, increase occurrences of spontaneity and ultimately find great ideas? Through anecdotes, interviews, quotes, tips, creative exercises and success stories from the biggest corporations in the country, author Sam Harrison shows you how to think outside the box—then throw away the box for good. You'll be encouraged to: Listen and observe Step outside your daily routine Explore through travel Find ideas in nature Break out of ruts Learn from mistakes Get past the surface Connect existing ideas Busy professionals CAN learn how to peek under the mundane to find the magical, to find insights rather than information, and to learn what makes their clients laugh, cry, scream—and ultimately buy.

Forget the 10,000 hour rule— what if it’s possible to learn the basics of any new skill in 20 hours or less? Take a moment to consider how many things you want to learn to do. What’s on your list? What’s holding you back from getting started? Are you worried about the time and effort it takes to acquire new skills—time you don’t have and effort you can’t spare? Research suggests it takes 10,000 hours to develop a new skill. In this nonstop world when will you ever find that much time and energy? To make matters worse, the early hours of prac­ticing something new are always the most frustrating. That’s why it’s difficult to learn how to speak a new language, play an instrument, hit a golf ball, or shoot great photos. It’s so much easier to watch TV or surf the web . . . In The First 20 Hours, Josh Kaufman offers a systematic approach to rapid skill acquisition— how to learn any new skill as quickly as possible. His method shows you how to deconstruct com­plex skills, maximize productive practice, and remove common learning barriers. By complet­ing just 20 hours of focused, deliberate practice you’ll go from knowing absolutely nothing to performing noticeably well. Kaufman personally field-tested the meth­ods in this book. You’ll have a front row seat as he develops a personal yoga practice, writes his own web-based computer programs, teaches himself to touch type on a nonstandard key­board, explores the oldest and most complex board game in history, picks up the ukulele, and learns how to windsurf. Here are a few of the sim­ple techniques he teaches: Define your target performance level: Fig­ure out what your desired level of skill looks like, what you’re trying to achieve, and what you’ll be able to do when you’re done. The more specific, the better. Deconstruct the skill: Most of the things we think of as skills are actually bundles of smaller subskills. If you break down the subcompo­nents, it’s easier to figure out which ones are most important and practice those first. Eliminate barriers to practice: Removing common distractions and unnecessary effort makes it much easier to sit down and focus on deliberate practice. Create fast feedback loops: Getting accu­rate, real-time information about how well you’re performing during practice makes it much easier to improve. Whether you want to paint a portrait, launch a start-up, fly an airplane, or juggle flaming chain­saws, The First 20 Hours will help you pick up the basics of any skill in record time . . . and have more fun along the way.

Science.

From Bryan Mattimore, innovation guru to Fortune 500 companies, comes a book for aspiring entrepreneurs, corporate “intrapreneurs,” and anyone else looking to break the mold. Bryan Mattimore is a big idea guy. For the past twenty-five years, he has helped Fortune 500 companies create over $3 billion in new innovations using his unique creative-thinking exercises. In 21 DAYS TO A BIG IDEA: CREATING BREAKTHROUGH BUSINESS CONCEPTS, Mattimore takes readers through a disciplined creative process to create original and practical new business concepts. By investing less than an hour a day for twenty-one days, you will: 1) learn a new toolkit of creative thinking strategies and problem-solving techniques that can be used for solving a wide variety of both personal and professional challenges, and 2) generate more than a dozen new concepts from which to choose the highest potential/winning idea for a new start-up. Entertaining and easy-to-follow, 21 DAYS TO A BIG IDEA is a must-read for all aspiring entrepreneurs, helping you to discover and implement your first—or your next—biggest idea. "Greatness starts with an idea, but the chasm between ideas and truly great ideas is vast. This terrific, approachable book provides a simple and straightforward method for bending and torturing almost any idea until it succumbs to greatness."—Bob Dorf, co-author of THE START-UP'S OWNER'S MANUAL

Generating new ideas is not a magical process. There are many ways to stimulate ideas and creativity@ work by getting into a creative state of mind. Growing Great Ideas: Unleashing Creativity at Work is a training guide providing easy, inexpensive ways to help ideas to flow more freely at work and train employees to think creatively to improve the bottom line.The book explores ideas and innovations, defines creativity's many faces, identifies barriers, and establishes the foundation to unleash problem-solving skills and creative potential, build teamwork, find new and improved processes, and turn business challenges into business opportunities.Show your employees the way, bring enthusiasm and fun, and most importantly, IDEAS back to work with Growing Great Ideas: Unleashing Creativity at Work.