Here are 100 books that Story Genius fans have personally recommended if you like
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My career began in television, and the demands wore on me over time. I started realizing that I cared just a little too much and too intensely. It was not emotionally or mentally healthy nor sustainable in the long run. Thus began my journey. Reading a few books turned into several courses, eventually leading to a PhD in Conscious-Centered Living. I realized I wanted to share with others what I learned along the way. However, coming from a creative background, I wanted to take a creative approach toward becoming happier and more content – and do it in a sustainable way. Thus, my book was created to help other seekers.
This book is another one that I read early in my inner journey and one I still often refer to for its insight and wisdom on meditation, breathing, and how the brain works. While it is chock full of science, it is reader-friendly. I also took Rick’s Neurodharma training, some of the most useful training I have received as a "TV producer turned wellbeing teacher" and now author.
As you would expect from any esteemed academic, he thoughtfully laid out his book, offering good summaries of key points at the end of each chapter – along with exercises and meditations to try throughout the book. If you like the wellbeing science stuff, this is a worthwhile read.
Jesus, Moses, Mohammed, Gandhi, and the Buddha all had brains built essentially like anyone else's, yet they were able to harness their thoughts and shape their patterns of thinking in ways that changed history.
With new breakthroughs in modern neuroscience and the wisdom of thousands of years of contemplative practice, it is possible for us to shape our own thoughts in a similar way for greater happiness, love, compassion, and wisdom.
Buddha's Brain joins the forces of modern neuroscience with ancient contemplative teachings to show readers how they can work toward greater emotional well-being, healthier relationships, more effective actions, and…
I’ve been obsessed with the creative process since I was 8 and read Harriet the Spy and realized her writing saved her and after I spied on one of my parent’s cocktail parties and wondered why everybody was so dull (I was so cheeky). Still, it’s the quest that drives me: how do we be fully ourselves in this world and how does creativity help? I explore this question on my podcast Create Out Loud and in my weekly newsletter, and these books have helped me formulate, if not answers, creative and mindful practices that sustain me daily. I hope they inspire you too.
Most creatives struggle with maintaining a creative practice in the face of busted water heaters, draining day jobs, and pesky emotions especially anxiety and depression. Beth’s refreshingly honest handbook is built on the premise you must find a way to make your art no matter what. She’s also been a guest on my podcast Create Out Loud and I loved everything she shared.
The Artist's Way for the 21st century-from esteemed creative counselor Beth Pickens.
If
you are an artist, you need to make your art. That's not an
overstatement-it's a fact; if you stop doing your creative work, your
quality of life is diminished. But what do you do when life gets in the
way? In this down-to-earth handbook, experienced artist coach Beth
Pickens offers practical advice for developing a lasting and meaningful
artistic practice in the face of life's inevitable obstacles and
distractions. This thoughtful volume suggests creative ways to address
the challenges all artists must overcome-from making decisions about
time,…
I’ve been obsessed with the creative process since I was 8 and read Harriet the Spy and realized her writing saved her and after I spied on one of my parent’s cocktail parties and wondered why everybody was so dull (I was so cheeky). Still, it’s the quest that drives me: how do we be fully ourselves in this world and how does creativity help? I explore this question on my podcast Create Out Loud and in my weekly newsletter, and these books have helped me formulate, if not answers, creative and mindful practices that sustain me daily. I hope they inspire you too.
This is one of those secret gems of a book that hardly anybody has heard of but after you read it, you’ll be giving multiple copies away to every creative you know. Rich with real-life examples from working artists and writers, and Priscilla’s long history as a working creative and teacher, I have underlined an idea or suggestion on almost every page.
Minding the Muse is a practical handbook for the artist or writer—highly experienced, aspiring, or somewhere in between. Long draws from her extensive background as a poet, writer, and master teacher, but also gathers the insights and practices of a wide range of high-achieving artists, including mystery writer Raymond Chandler, choreographer Twyla Tharp, poet and performance artist Patti Smith, and the painter Joan Miró. Beginning with the first sparks of artistic creation—“Gathering, Hoarding, Conceptualizing”—Long moves through the various stages to “Completing Works” and “Poet as Peddler, Painter as Pusher: Marketing.” Every creative worker will find something here to take to…
I am a clinical psychologist with a Ph.D. from Harvard. My personal experience of burnout, when I was a psychologist on a medical team in a hospital setting, led me to specialize in burnout in my private therapy practice. I’ve been doing therapy with adults experiencing chronic stress and burnout for many years since. I’ve also interviewed thought leaders in mental health on my podcast, Psychologists Off the Clock. I understand the complexity of burnout and the reason “quick fixes,” like individual wellness interventions, are often not enough to help with burnout. To really solve the problem, we must “dig deeper” and find both personal and cultural solutions.
If there is a “silver lining” to burnout, it’s that sometimes it can inspire growth and change. Four Thousand Weeks inspired me to do some soul-searching on what I care most about in my life, and to rethink how I spend my time.
I always thought I struggled to manage time because I wasn’t efficient and focused enough - until I realized that wasn’t the problem! The problem was that I had too much on my plate, and I wasn’t making hard decisions about what needed to go, in order to have room for the more important things. Burkeman’s wise and inspiring book completely changed my point of view about how to spend my time, and it has made a big difference in my life.
"Provocative and appealing . . . well worth your extremely limited time." ―Barbara Spindel, The Wall Street Journal
The average human lifespan is absurdly, insultingly brief. Assuming you live to be eighty, you have just over four thousand weeks.
Nobody needs telling there isn’t enough time. We’re obsessed with our lengthening to-do lists, our overfilled inboxes, work-life balance, and the ceaseless battle against distraction; and we’re deluged with advice on becoming more productive and efficient, and “life hacks” to optimize our days. But such techniques often end up making things worse. The sense of…
I'm a British writer, (though I now live and work in California) and a Stanford professor who is passionate about helping everyone know they have endless potential and that math is a subject of creativity, connections, and beautiful ideas. I spend time battling against math elitism, systemic racism, and the other barriers that have stopped women and people of color from going forward in STEM. I am the cofounder of youcubed, a site that inspires millions of educators and their students, with creative mathematics and mindset messages. I've also made a math app, designed to help students feel good about struggling, called Struggly.com. I love to write books that help people develop their mathematical superpowers!
I love all of Eugenia’s books, she is a cool mathematician working to educate the public about real mathematics – a subject of deep explorations and connected ideas.
Eugenia shares the creativity in mathematics, and the importance of pushing against boundaries, including the gender boundaries that often stop girls and women going forward in STEM. Her playful use of mathematical ideas to disrupt the myths of narrow and inequitable mathematics and the dominance of men in the field, is so fascinating, especially for those of us perturbed by the inequities in STEM.
This is a great book for those who would like to love mathematics a little more than they do now.
One of the world’s most creative mathematicians offers a new way to look at math—focusing on questions, not answers
Where do we learn math: From rules in a textbook? From logic and deduction? Not really, according to mathematician Eugenia Cheng: we learn it from human curiosity—most importantly, from asking questions. This may come as a surprise to those who think that math is about finding the one right answer, or those who were told that the “dumb” question they asked just proved they were bad at math. But Cheng shows why people who ask questions like “Why does 1 +…
Alex Hillman is always thinking about the intersection of people, relationships, trust, and business. He’s an author, educator, and community builder. These days, he splits his time between operating Indy Hall, which is one of the oldest coworking spaces in the world; teaching creative people how to bootstrap their own businesses at Stacking the Bricks; and collaborating with people and organizations towards the goal of helping 10,000 people become sustainably independent by 2029.
The most insidious mistakes we make are the ones we didn’t even realize we were making. This short book brilliantly shines a light on the thousands of “invisible” choices that we make in our work and our lives, but more importantly, the author guides us on how to begin correcting them.
Using examples and case studies, author David Dylan Thomas helps you bring awareness to three lenses of bias that are guaranteed to be affecting your work: how biases impact our own individual experiences and choices, how they wiggle their way into our teams and leadership structures, and how they get wired directly into the products and services we deliver.
If you care about creating long-lasting and equitable results with your work, you need to read this book.
We humans are messy, illogical creatures who like to imagine we’re in control—but we blithely let our biases lead us astray. In Design for Cognitive Bias, David Dylan Thomas lays bare the irrational forces that shape our everyday decisions and, inevitably, inform the experiences we craft. Once we grasp the logic powering these forces, we stand a fighting chance of confronting them, tempering them, and even harnessing them for good. Come along on a whirlwind tour of the cognitive biases that encroach on our lives and our work, and learn to start designing more consciously.
Most of my books (101 Philosophy Problems, Wittgenstein's Beetle, Critical Thinking for Dummies, and so on) are on thinking skills, in the broad sense. However, I'm always a bit uncomfortable when I'm presented as an expert on thinking, as people tend to imagine I must have some brainy strategies for thinking better when my interest is also in the ways we "think badly." Because logic is really a blunt tool, compared to the brilliant insights that come with intuition. Yet how do you train your intuition? So the books I've chosen here are all ones that I've found don't so much tell you how to think, but actually get you thinking. And that's always been my aim in my books too.
This is the book that got me thinking about thought experiments. It really opened up my eyes to a whole new way of thinking – mainly by introducing me to the wonderfully playful, indeed modern style of writing that Galileo used to present his groundbreaking scientific theories – way back in seventeenth-century Italy!
Sorenson is a philosophy professor and goes on a bit, but his book was also groundbreaking in a way. My own books owe him a debt and for scholarly types, he also suggests a general theory "of"thought experiments: meaning what they are, how they work, and what is good - and bad - about them.
In this book, Roy Sorensen presents the first general theory of the thought experiment. He analyses a wide variety of thought experiments, ranging from aesthetics to zoology, and explores what thought experiments are, how they work, and what their positive and negative aspects are. Sorensen also sets his theory within an evolutionary framework and integrates recent advances in experimental psychology and the history of science.
I'm an internationally recognised opinion leader in sustainable fashion. My career started as a designer with the pioneering upcycling label From Somewhere, which I launched in 1997. My label’s designer collaborations include collections for Jigsaw, Speedo, and 4 best-selling capsule collections for Topshop. In 2006, I co-founded the British Fashion Council Initiative Estethica at London Fashion Week, which I curated until 2014. In 2013 I co-founded Fashion Revolution, a global campaign with participation in over 90 countries. I'm a regular keynote speaker and mentor, and Associate Visiting Professor at Middlesex University. My first book Loved Clothes Last is published by Penguin Life, Corbaccio Editore in Italy and in France by Edition Marabou.
Exploring an earth-centric view of business for the future, envisioning regenerative systems where fashion can support, rather than deplete our planet’s finite resources, this book challenges the concept of growth and offers real alternatives.
This book feels challenging, but is rooted in common sense, it may seem out there and unrealistic, but being about Earth it actually makes it feel not just possible but eminently doable.
Of all my university courses, the one that had the greatest impact on me was called "Informal Logic." Accurate, but misleadingly dry and academic. One of the assignments in that course—and the one I remember most, of all my university assignments—was to prepare a "Crapbook": a collection of ten bits of crap—ads, arguments, whatever—that were full of crap (essentially, incorrect reasoning/logical fallacies). I loved it. So when, twenty years later, I was hired by a small university to teach Critical Thinking …
What can I say? Logic and Mr. Limbaugh is a crapbook (see my introduction) dedicated exclusively to Rush Limbaugh. Although dated (1995), this little book is extremely engaging, entertaining, and enlightening. And applicable to all the other Rush Limbaughs out there, past, present, and future. (Might there be a Logic and Mr. Trump manuscript-in-progress?)
Logic and Mr. Limbaugh is both an entertaining introduction to the elements of logic and a serious critique of the practical logic of a major conservative propagandist. Professor Perkins takes 50 examples of logical reasoning from Rush's statements, identifies the logical arguments, and points out fallacies.
I make prints and visual books. I founded Bridge Press, now in Kennebunk, Maine, 1989 to publish limited edition artist's books and etchings. The name of the press underscores the collaborative nature of book making. Visual books offered possibilities for the continuity, connection, and unfolding of images—each image is complete yet linked to every other through the structure of the book. Books seemed an ideal vehicle to assemble and connect my prints, to order and unfold a sequence of images, with defined and recurrent shapes, motifs, and composition, and to create a setting in which each image is complete yet linked to every other through the structure of the binding or enclosure.
An endlessly fascinating and extensive compendium of reproductions of photographs, diagrams, charts, maps, paintings – bizarre, sublime, caustic, illuminating – from the ancients to the modern era. Each image retains something of its historical context, yet they are arrayed with a compelling visual logic by a brilliant visual editor.
An exploration of echoes and resonances across two millennia of visual culture, celebrating ten years of The Public Domain Review.
Gathering a remarkable collection of over 500 public domain images, Affinities is a carefully curated visual journey illuminating connections across more than two thousand years of image-making. Drawing on a decade of archival immersion at The Public Domain Review, the book has been assembled from a vast array of sources: from manuscripts to museum catalogues, ship logs to primers on Victorian magic. The images are arranged in a single captivating sequence which unfurls according to a dreamlike logic, through a…
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