Why I wrote a book about creativity
Vasanth Seshadri
Founder and Creative Director at The Sunny Side | Author of "The Creative Human" (Worldwide No. 10 Bestseller) and "Cultural Engineering" (Worldwide No. 11 Bestseller)
I published my third book,?The Creative Human , a few days ago. I call it a?comprehensive guide to nurturing and unleashing your creativity. It starts off by talking about the brief history of our species’ creativity and what constitutes a creative mindset. It then lays out an ideation-evaluation-execution framework for creativity with ample discussion of techniques and habits valuable in the three stages. After that, it zooms out into a discussion of how the best creative people sustain quality creative output all their lives, what makes companies more creative, what shaped the emergence of the most creative countries the world has ever seen, and how technology promises to empower exciting new arenas of creativity.
What made me write it?
The seeds of it were sowed in my 2020 book,?Cultural Engineering , in which I wrote about the myriad ways in which businesses and brands are engineering culture, from the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty to Ariel’s Share the Load to REI’s OptOutside initiative. The book did pretty well and reached a peak worldwide position of No. 11 in Amazon’s Media & Communications category.
A small part of that book was on the creative techniques used by some of these campaigns. But I did not dive deeper into creativity because I told myself that it was not a book about creativity.
While revisiting Cultural Engineering in 2022, it occurred to me: If that was not a book about creativity and therefore not the right place to talk about creativity,?let me write a book about creativity!
This was also the time I started doing an Executive MBA at Singapore Management University (SMU) which exposed me to ideas beyond marketing, such as finance, operations, sustainability and digital transformation. That stimulated me to read more books about leadership like?CEO Excellence ?(2022) by Carolyn Dewar, Scott Keller and Vikram Malhotra. As I read beyond my core competence, I saw that mountains of work have been done to study management, leadership and strategy.
But when I looked for similar books about creativity, I saw that those simply did not exist in meaningful numbers.?Even if they did, they focused on specific creative fields like advertising, or they were biographies of creative individuals like Walter Isaacson’s one on?Leonardo da Vinci ?(2017). Even the books by the famous Ed De Bono like?Lateral Thinking ?(1973) and?The Six Thinking Hats ?(1985) were focused on the thinking process of individual ideas, but did not talk about how creative people nurture their creativity, how they sustain it, how they build creative organizations and entire creative societies, and how they fuse technology with creativity.
Since such a holistic study of creativity did not exist, I decided to write it.
I decided to gather knowledge from all the various creative fields I’ve had the privilege of being exposed to. Every movie I’ve watched, every song I’ve heard, every museum I’ve visited and every game I’ve played became raw material for this book. The ideation, evaluation and execution involved in creative work in all mediums became key to what I wrote. The habits and qualities of my favorite creative people also became treasure troves of learnings. The fact that I’ve been exposed to the creativity of various cultures and geographies throughout my life also made things a whole lot easier for me.
It was a huge challenge to think of a name for such a wide-reaching book. I thought of “The Creative Mindset” but in the end, it turned out to be the name of just one chapter of the book! Since it’s a very macro and overarching book, I thought of “The Creative Universe” but this sounded like a book that rambles and goes to all kinds of irrelevant places.
Then I looked at how all these various aspects of creativity (a creative mindset, ideation, evaluation, execution, follow through, creative leadership, and technology) have come together to form the most creative species the world has ever seen, which is us. We are the species that has transformed the world with our creativity more than any other species. We should rightfully be called?The Creative Human.
Once I had this name, nothing else quite seemed to make sense.
Readers so far have been surprised by the sheer range of creative work I’ve written about. This is probably the first book that talks about cave paintings and ChatGPT, Salvador Dali and Snoop Dogg, Bauhaus design and BTS, Renaissance Florence and RRR, Mozart and Midjourney, Tolkien and Thai advertising. But instead of making it a string of anecdotes, I’ve attempted to dive deep into the creative soul of humanity and emerge with insights we can all learn from and qualities we can all cultivate.
Whether you are an emerging creative laying a foundation for your career, a seasoned creative looking to stay sharp, or a leader working to make your company or country more creative, this book is for you.
I look forward to your thoughts once you’ve read it. Here are the links from which you can get yourself a copy.
Worldwide:?https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C3MLBVV9
Germany:?https://www.amazon.de/dp/B0C3MLBVV9
Australia:?https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B0C3MLBVV9