The inspiring self-help guide Your Next Big Idea forwards advice and creative exercises that encourage the development of different ways of thinking.
Samuel Sanders’s playful self-help workbook, Your Next Big Idea, encourages creative thinking and problem solving; it has both business and personal applications.
Creative thinking, the book claims, is essential when it comes to solving personal and workplace problems. Whether processes need to be streamlined, or new products and services are being contemplated and developed, problem solving is necessary; yet, Sanders claims, it’s a skill that’s not often sufficiently taught. This text aims to help audiences cultivate such skills through thoughtful practices and deliberate thinking.
The book guides its audience through a multitude of exercises in order to identify problems, explore creative solutions, eliminate biases, and test the viability of ideas and potential solutions. It brainstorms through challenges, like picking up on what other people say they hate or are annoyed by; and suggests exercises, like imagining an alien trying to solve the same problem you’re grappling with. The book’s general suggestions and prompts—to identify problems; to search for solutions; to ask the right questions; and to identify personal habits—are also helpful when it comes to instigating creativity.
Though it is structured in such a way that it can be read and worked through in sequence, the text includes an option to approach it with key explorations in mind. As such, its exercises will be useful to people at all levels of the creative process, whether they have already brainstormed solutions, or they need to return to earlier points to reconsider their methods. It is encouraging at all points.
The book’s suggested tasks, if they are approached with care and deliberation, stand to train one’s mind to preemptively seek out problems and their potential solutions. It functions well as a creative thinking course whose lessons can be returned to on a continual basis. Its workbook spaces for writing out and completing exercises, including those which involve drawing, are also useful. While some of its prompts and stories are familiar, its introduction to its concepts is solid, and is likely to jumpstart creative and out-of-the-box thinking well.
With the appealing suggestion that it can help its audience to generate 100 good ideas a week, the inspiring self-help guide Your Next Big Idea forwards advice and creative exercises to encourage the development of different ways of thinking.
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.