Creative Careers

Raise your hand if you've ever shopped online, made a financial decision, or pondered taking a job offer. What do all these have in common? They all require critical thinking. From deciding how to spend your money to where you want to work, critical thinking is essential for making choices that pay off. Applying critical thinking empowers you to assess your situation and make beneficial choices.

Being consistently happy now can begin very simply without any reason at all. It is not a complex formula that one needs to sit for hours meditating to arrive upon either. One does not necessarily need to see a psychoanalyst to explore the source of one's pain to arrive at a happy state either. It's so easy a child can do it.

When we're kids, our parents tell us that being creative is fun, fun, fun. But when you decide to turn art into your career, whether that's painting, writing, drawing, or sculpting Edgar Allan Poe out of earthworms, that's when things get tough. In this insightful and heartfelt guide, artist and speaker Phil Hansen shares his hard-won wisdom from the front lines of life as a professional creative. Hansen provides advice for the difficult moments - the slumps, the creative blocks, the times when something you love doesn't resonate with the world - and gives you the pep talk you need....

Discover how to use visual goal setting to turn your dreams into reality. Filled with stories of personal and client experiences, this book will convince you that you don't have to be an artist or know how to draw to use these tools. You just have to be willing to honestly explore where you are, dream where you want to be, and choose the three bold steps you will take to make it happen. Using the latest neuroscience findings, test out how to trick your brain into helping you get what you want.

For 50 years, writers at every stage of their careers have turned to the literary nonprofit organization Poets & Writers and its award-winning magazine for resources to foster their professional development, from writing prompts and tips on technique to informative interviews with published authors, literary agents, and editors. But never before has Poets & Writers marshalled its 50 years’ worth of knowledge to create an authoritative guide for writers that answers every imaginable question about craft and career - until now.

Popular creative coach Gail McMeekin, author of the best-selling The 12 Secrets of Highly Creative Women, offers a wealth of advice for the specific challenges creative women face today: thinking too small, underestimating the need for change, fearing the future, and lacking self-confidence. McMeekin combines interviews with some of today’s most successful women and her own proven success strategies to help readers transcend their “blocks” and achieve success.

The ad apocalypse is upon us. Today millions are downloading ad-blocking software, and still more are paying subscription premiums to avoid ads. This $600 billion industry is now careening toward outright extinction after having taken for granted a captive audience for too long, a choice that has led to lazy, overabundant, and frankly annoying ads. Make no mistake, Madison Avenue: Traditional advertising as we know it is over.

In the tradition of A Whole New Mind and The War of Art, graffiti artist and corporate thought leader Erik Wahl explores the power of creativity to achieve superior performance. Somehow we've come to believe that creativity is reserved for the chosen few: the poets, the painters, the writers. The truth is creativity is in all of us and re-discovering it is the key to unlocking your fullest potential.

Whether it's the great American novel or a groundbreaking new app, many people want to create a Big Thing, but finding the motivation to get started, let alone complete the work, can be daunting. In The Big Thing, New York Times business writer and editor Phyllis Korkki combines real-life stories, science, and insights from her own experience to illuminate the factors that drive people to complete big creative projects - and the obstacles that threaten to derail success.

From GQ's "Nerd of the Year" to one of Time's most influential people in the world, Biz Stone represents different things to different people. But he is known to all as the creative, effervescent, funny, charmingly positive and remarkably savvy co-founder of Twitter - the social media platform that singlehandedly changed the way the world works. Now, Biz tells fascinating, pivotal, and personal stories from his early life and his careers at Google and Twitter, sharing his knowledge about the nature and importance of ingenuity today.

The Art of Starting guides you from the first step right through to the everyday running of a successful creative business. Whether your passion is in craft, photography, food, fashion or design, this audiobook is full of indispensable advice. Iona Mathieson and Romy St Clair are two entrepreneurs who learnt the hard way and are here to share everything they wish they’d known at the start. Their practical advice helps you to use what you already know and develop future proof skills in a fulfilling job that works for you.

Being creative is a state of mind. Techniques may help, though some, like brainstorming, can, surprisingly, do more harm than good. And the climate at work and play matters too. But essentially, creativity is an attitude. We either meet life's challenges with a spirit of adventure, or we keep trying to make it fit old habits that don't work any more.

The founder of the Science of Mind and Religious Science wrote the book in 1919, and we have distilled this book into a synopsis and short VIP summary. This little book is an attempt to explain what each soul must discover for himself, that he stands in the midst of an eternal creative power which presses itself around his own thought, and casts back to him glorified all that he thinks.

Join speaker and coach Heather Whelpley as she shares her life-changing journey to let go of proving, pleasing, and perfecting—and guides you to do the same. Through a seamless blend of vulnerable, heartfelt stories and practical tools, you'll discover why you go into overachieving perfection mode.

Learn the art-focused practices & tools to become a whole-brained entrepreneur working from a state of curiosity and creativity. Susie deVille, with her unwavering passion and contagious energy, is on a mission to unveil the transformative power of self-trust.

Do you ever sense that you're not using your mind to its fullest potential? Being "stuck" means your brain is repeating the same neurological firing patterns again and again. It happens in business, relationships, personal goals, and mental health, over and over.

This is an excerpt from the book Creative Writing Career: Becoming a Writer of Movies, Video Games, and Books. This section comprises the entire section on book writing (fiction and non-fiction), to include author interviews, and is Part Six of the book.

Mira Tasich, a loyal, hardworking, and devoted employee of several large corporations, finds herself unemployed, a victim of the recession. As a young teenager, she moved to America, learned a new language, and gained prestige and career success only to get laid off in a corporate downsizing. Frustrated, angry, and confused, she struggles to justify the familial and personal sacrifices made over the years for her employers, including a 2,141-mile move away from family and friends to the Southwest.

While writers, designers, editors, and other creative professionals spend years learning and refining creative craft skills, those skills do nothing to prepare us for the human, organizational, and operational challenges that come with promotions to leadership. And as your responsibility grows, it’s those organizational and leadership skills that will hold you and your team back.

Each chapter builds on common terms and transformational strategies. The aim is to turn you into a savvy leader who is respected and can offer your client or business challenge the confidence to deliver. Let us also not forget that there are lots of real-world examples of proof that this approach will work.