Confidence Classic: The Method to Solve Any Problem Fast with Jeremy Utley

Innovative businesses change the world, but how do these companies develop their radical and creative ideas? In The Innovator’s DNA, Hal Gregersen, Jeff Dyer, and Clayton Christensen identify five key skills that are shared by the world's most innovative business leaders. The authors show how you can develop and strengthen these skills, whether you're a business owner, executive, or aspiring entrepreneur.

In this guide, we explore why innovation in business is so important, outline the set of behaviors and skills that you can adopt to unlock your inner innovator, and explain how to drive meaningful change by embedding these behaviors and skills into your organizations and teams. Along the way, we include additional insights from the authors’ other works. We also share ideas from other business experts, innovative thinkers, and cognitive psychologists so you can understand and adopt the innovation skills you need to boost your business and career success.

Looking beyond inspiration to discover the true nature of creativity? These seven books reveal how great artists think, work, and overcome the resistance we all face.

If you’ve ever felt a creative tug or impulse, writer Elizabeth Gilbert can help you act on it. According to Gilbert, the author of the best-selling memoir Eat Pray Love, creativity is not just the domain of a few brilliant professional artists, but rather an enriching way of life that anyone can adopt at any time. If you embrace creativity, you’ll experience “Big Magic”: a mystical or spiritual force of creativity that brings joy and purpose.

In this guide, you’ll learn how, according to Gilbert, you can commune with the forces of creativity and establish an enjoyable, rewarding creative practice that can last a lifetime. You’ll also find commentary that provides actionables to help you implement Gilbert’s ideas around creativity, gives context around Gilbert’s writing on spirituality and art, and explores scientific explanations for the creative phenomena Gilbert attributes to magic.

In his epic 707-page Tools of Titans, Tim Ferriss shares the habits and beliefs of 101 people at the top of their game, including tech investors like Chris Sacca and Peter Thiel, entrepreneurs like LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and Evernote’s Phil Libin, superhuman athletes like Amelia Boone and Wim Hof, media figures like Edward Norton and Whitney Cummings, and more.

These are the principles that successful people use to achieve audacious goals, improve themselves, and be happier. The premise: if you can apply the lessons from this book, you can be more effective.

Many people want to be more innovative. But how do you generate good ideas? And do you execute to make them real? Originals studies the habits and practices of innovators so you too can innovate. You’ll learn the most important factor in generating more good ideas, how procrastination can actually help you generate better ideas, and how to rally an organization to your new idea.

We’ve all felt trapped at some point in our lives, when our motivation falters and all our hard work grinds to a halt. In Anatomy of a Breakthrough, Adam Alter argues that everybody hits roadblocks in life, and because we hide our frustration, we’re unaware that everyone else goes through the same thing. However, there’s hope even when you feel trapped, and Alter proposes a range of solutions that might help you find your way out of the woods.

In this guide, we’ll explain what it means to be “stuck,” the barriers that often cause this, and how reacting poorly to a perceived lack of progress can only dig you in deeper. We’ll then describe Alter’s remedy—slowing down, exploring new perspectives, and making your own luck through persistence. We’ll also connect Alter’s ideas with those of other motivation experts, what other writers say about perseverance, and how exploring uncharted terrain can turn failures into opportunities.

When Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios, started his career, he had one goal: Create films using computer-generated animation. Despite a multitude of challenges, Catmull worked tirelessly to advance the technology of computer animation and, eventually, co-founded Pixar to marry his love of animation with his expertise in computer technology.

Through the journey of Pixar’s creation, Catmull developed leadership strategies that fostered creativity in the workplace while ensuring that the company remained profitable and successful. In Creativity, Inc., Catmull breaks down the most important factors in building and sustaining a creative culture. From removing fear from failure and protecting new ideas, Catmull explains the ways Pixar’s creative culture allowed it to grow into the animation behemoth it is today.

Have you ever had a sudden burst of inspiration that led you to a new solution to a problem? Or have you ever marveled at seemingly impossible modern inventions like the internet? If so, you may wonder how individuals are able to come up with such incredible innovations and how they develop them over time. In Where Good Ideas Come From, best-selling author and theorist Steven Johnson explains how good ideas grow from minor inklings to groundbreaking inventions, and how you can use this knowledge to come up with the best ideas possible.

In our guide, we’ll explore how good ideas grow from previous knowledge and networks. We’ll also look at how hunches lead to full-fledged ideas, often as a result of sudden insights, and how mistakes and the repurposing of other ideas can lead to new ones. Finally, we’ll compare Johnson’s ideas with ideas from other authors, contextualize them in other fields, and add tips for putting Johnson’s recommendations into practice.

All business methods, technologies, and consumer products grow obsolete and are replaced by something new. Innovation is the process of discovering those new ways of living, working, and doing business, and entrepreneurs are the people who work to bring the future into being. In Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Peter F. Drucker describes innovation as a methodical process to find ways to improve every aspect of business and life.

Drucker is widely regarded as one of the most influential thinkers in the field of modern management. In this guide, we’ll describe Drucker’s template for structuring an entrepreneurial organization and how to explore innovative opportunities. We'll go over strategies for bringing innovations to the market and discuss how to manage entrepreneurial startups. We’ll also examine how Drucker’s ideas carry forward into the 21st century, and we’ll compare how Drucker’s thoughts on innovation compare to those of business leaders today.

Why do we spend a third of our lives dreaming? In This Is Why You Dream, neurosurgeon Rahul Jandial argues that dreams aren’t random mental noise—they’re essential neurological processes that keep your thinking flexible, process difficult emotions, spark creative breakthroughs, and help form your identity. Through firsthand observations and cutting-edge research, Jandial explains how dreams work, what they reveal about your inner life, and how you can actively shape them.

Learn to interpret your dreams using a two-step method based on brain science, manage recurring nightmares, harness sleep states for creative problem-solving, and even practice lucid dreaming—becoming aware you’re dreaming while asleep. Further, discover how REM and non-REM sleep work together, whether dream advertising actually works, and how Jandial’s techniques connect to practices from sleep researchers and Buddhist monks alike.

Think you're in control of your decisions? Think again. In Subliminal, theoretical physicist and acclaimed science writer Leonard Mlodinow reveals how our unconscious mind shapes everything from our memories and emotions to our social interactions and daily choices—often without us realizing it. Drawing on neuroscience research, he shows how understanding these hidden influences can help us make better decisions and form deeper connections with others.

Our guide situates Mlodinow's insights in the context of the latest research on how the unconscious mind works. We examine how films and TV shows like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Severance illuminate the nature of memory and emotions, what Covid-19 responses reveal about motivated reasoning, and why understanding whale songs might help us appreciate our unconscious processing of the world. Whether you're interested in improving your relationships, making better decisions, or simply understanding yourself more deeply, this guide offers fresh perspectives on how your mind really works.

In the self-improvement classic The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, Joseph Murphy claims that all of your life experiences are the result of the interaction between your conscious and subconscious minds: Your subconscious mind creates your life experiences according to your habitual conscious thoughts and ingrained beliefs. Murphy argues that you can dramatically improve your life experiences by using your conscious mind to imprint positive thoughts and beliefs upon your subconscious mind.

In this guide, we’ve reorganized Murphy’s ideas into four distinct parts, first exploring Murphy’s philosophy and then diving into the actionable ideas you can apply in your own life. Additionally, we’ve compared and contrasted each key concept with up-to-date psychological research and advice. We’ve also expanded on Murphy’s methods with actionable ideas from other self-improvement practitioners and psychologists.