To: Fong: Your book review is coming soon! I shouldn’t have waited because now it’s not so fresh in my mind.

Fav musical artists

As I mentioned in a post or two, David Usher has been one of my favourite musical artists since I was about 18 years old. Yes, I did wait in line for a couple of CD signings! But I was not the crazy screaming type.

Multi-talented

His music has been playing in the background over the years, but for a few years, I didn’t really follow his career too closely. Recently, I decided to Google him and what did I find out? He is so super-talented – he does not only write songs, sing and play guitar -he wrote a book; developed/developing some AI; is involved with Amnesty International; gives presentations (can’t say I am 100% sure what he talks about- but does it really matter? He’s got my attention).

Let the Elephants Run

When I found out he wrote a book about unleashing/unlocking creativity, I knew I had to pick up a copy. So Tuesday night I began reading. Cover to cover took me just under two hours.

Here are my comments:

1. The actual book: it feels really solid when holding it and it’s a good size for easy reading. Very eye-catching.
2. Pages: loved the rich texture and page thickness- the feel underneath my fingers.
3. Content: Really inspiring. Love the creativeness of the book itself. The pages are colourful and you can have fun looking for the pink text (like the pink elephant running around) throughout the book and little black elephant on the bottom of all pages. You might even find some ants…There are many interesting concepts David writes about like structure of society; how we are born creative, but lose some of our creativity as we get older mainly because of structure and rules. Our society tries to make everyone conform, but we need to think outside the box; and how the creative aspect is only about 5% of the work and the rest is just hard work and good business planning.

I learned a few things:

1. School systems were set up a certain way to basically train people to sit for long hours in factories. I never really thought about this before, but now it makes sense.

2) The difference between a commercial book and a non-commercial book. I struggled with understanding this when I first started working on my own books – even a publisher contact that I knew tried to explain this to me about five times (but I still didn’t get it because her explanation was a bit weak). So thanks David for helping me to understand this.

3) It is A-OK to write in a lovely book. David encourages that you just jot down notes all over. His book is like a workbook with steps to understand yourself, your business plan and how to bring back your creative side.

4) Momentum. It is important to just scribble down anything even if you can’t focus on a written piece. My momentum slowed for my novel, but then I started just to write down random thoughts like David suggests, and sure enough, my groove is back!

In this thing called life – don’t think, just pick up a copy of his book (FYI -I don’t get any commission lol) and see if you can release your creative self again. You can buy at Chapters in-store and online.