Saturday, April 23, 2016

Book Review: Burn This Book- A Creativity Tool


The title of this one grabbed me right off, so I jumped at the opportunity to review it. Fernando Suarezserna takes readers through a series of stories and exercises that are designed to help people become more creative and productive people. 

He encourages the reader to take each exercise and step seriously in order to get the most out of the book, and I have to say that I love his philosophy regarding the exercises and book in general. He believes that once you have taken the time and effort to work through the book, you'll be able to "burn this book", so to speak. For him, that means passing along to book to someone else who might need it. 

He talks about strategies to keep social media from taking away from your creative time, how to keep bad habits from messing with your life and routine, as well as not over doing when you start something new. Action boxes include setting your phone to airplane mode for 45 minutes, identifying bad habits, and defining your creative space. 

Throughout the book, he tells stories from his childhood as well as stories like Wassily Kandinsky's. Each one is designed to teach and inspire one to take the steps in the book and take risks, as the author mentioned doing by deciding at 18 years old that he was going to get into guitar. Most would say that's too late to do so, but he went ahead and started lessons anyway. The of that story and Kandinsky's is that it's never too late to make a change in one's life and start something new. 

I'd definitely recommend this to people just getting started in writing or some other endeavor, as well as those who might need a push to make some changes in their life and routine. 


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