Creative Endurance: 56 Rules for Overcoming Obstacles and Achieving Your Goals

by Mike Schnaidt

Overview

Unlock Your Creative Potential and Go the Distance

Creative Endurance is the ultimate guide for every creative professional seeking to stay motivated, inspired, and resilient while achieving big-picture goals.

Feeling stuck or burned out? Creative director of Fast Company and accomplished marathon runner Mike Schnaidt shares powerful strategies to help you push through creative blocks and stay inventive in any situation—throughout your career and life.

Packed with 56 actionable “rules” and inspiring stories from designers, astronauts, illustrators, ultramarathoners, chefs, photographers, and even an Olympic Gold medalist, this book offers a rare blend of practical advice and motivational insights to fuel your creative journey.

• Persevere like Sagi Haviv, the graphic designer behind the US Open logo, who created over 6,000 sketches to craft the perfect design.
• Step behind the lens with Peter Yang as he captures unforgettable moments with icons like Barack Obama.
• Reach new heights with astronaut Jeanette Epps, who transitioned from Ford Motor Company engineer to NASA astronaut.
• Cook up creativity with Molly Baz, celebrated cookbook author, as she shares her approach to crafting irresistible recipes.
• Adopt the mental toughness of Olympic Gold medalist Billy Demong to prepare for any challenge.
• Gain focus and endurance from racing legend Hurley Haywood, with expert advice on sustaining motivation over the long haul.

Divided into four beautifully illustrated sections—Your Day, Your Project, Your Job, and Your Life—Creative Endurance provides a roadmap for navigating daily routines, tackling massive projects, and building a sustainable, thriving creative career. You’ll learn how to sharpen your focus, strengthen your imagination, pitch ideas with confidence, handle feedback, and manage challenges like hiring, budgeting, and scaling your impact.

Each chapter wraps up with interactive prompts and engaging activities designed to inspire action and reflection.

Whether you're launching your first creative project or leading a creative team, Creative Endurance will help you stay driven, overcome obstacles, and achieve lasting success—without sacrificing your well-being.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780760384824
Publisher:	Rockport Publishers
Publication date:	01/16/2024
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	7.50(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Mike Schnaidt is a designer, educator, and writer based in Jersey City, New Jersey. His first book, Creative Endurance, offers practical tips to help creatives overcome their biggest challenges. As Fast Company’s creative director, he leads a team of art directors and photo editors who create visual content for the brand. Schnaidt has designed a variety of publications covering pop culture, fashion, food, and science, and has won awards from the Society of Publication Designers, Advertising Age, and Art Directors Club. He holds a Master of Science in Communication Design from Pratt Institute and teaches graphic design at Kean University.

Table of Contents

FOREWORD
INTRODUCTION
PACK THESE TOOLS
WHO’S WHO
Your Day
START MOVING, KEEP MOVING
CARRY A NOTEBOOK
SLOW DOWN YOUR RESPONSE
TEDIOUS TASK? HIGHER PURPOSE
BREAK A BORING ROUTINE
RACE THROUGH DISTRACTIONS
THE PITCH DOESN’T NEED TO BE PERFECT
ONE (AND A HALF) THINGS AT A TIME
DON’T TRY SO HARD
UNLEASH YOUR CREATIVE POWER SUIT
REST FOR GREATER SUCCESS
END YOUR DAY ON TIME
DON’T ALWAYS END YOUR DAY ON TIME
SPRINT FASTER BY THINKING LESS
Your Project
BEGIN WITH RESEARCH
COMBINE YOUR BEST IDEAS
JUST. SAY. YES.
BUT WAIT. DON’T ALWAYS SAY YES.
BREAK BIG PROJECTS INTO SMALL PIECES
SET SIMPLE GOALS
THE CLIENT ISN’T ALWAYS WRONG
THE CLIENT ISN’T ALWAYS RIGHT
REVISIONS AREN’T THAT BAD
PUT YOUR ERRORS ON TRIAL
LEAN ON SOMEONE ELSE
GIVE HONEST FEEDBACK
MAKE A CASE FOR YOUR WORK
PLAN FOR A WRENCH
Your Job
BE YOURSELF IN AN INTERVIEW
NURTURE YOUR NETWORK
NEW JOB? FRESH START
BE DIRECT WITH A TOUGH BOSS
PRESENTATIONS DON’T HAVE TO SUCK
TAKE THE SCENIC ROUTE TO YOUR DREAM JOB
HIRE PEOPLE YOU CAN HANG WITH
DISCOVER YOUR CREATIVE HERO
IMPOSTOR SYNDROME IS FUEL
SMALL BUDGET? BIG OPPORTUNITY
SPEND ALL YOUR MONEY!
YOUR A-TEAM NEEDS AN X, A Y, AND A Z
IT MIGHT BE TIME TO LET SOMEONE GO
LOSING A JOB CAN BE GOOD FOR YOU
Your Life
TRUST YOUR TEAM
CULTURE IS YOUR SUPERPOWER
FEED YOUR VALUES
ONE-UP YOURSELF
RECRUIT A CREATIVE COPILOT
DON’T TAKE LIFE SO SERIOUSLY
LISTEN
DEFINE YOUR MEASURE OF SUCCESS
BUILD A SUPPORTIVE COMMUNITY
REACH FOR THE PAST
YOU DON’T HAVE TO WIN AN AWARD
EXPERIENCE IS EVERYTHING
BE PERFECTLY IMPERFECT
MAKE AN IMPACT
CONCLUSION
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
 

Editorial Reviews

"Full of examples from Schnaidt’s clients, plus ample actionable tips for anyone interested in flexing their creativity muscles to build long-term strength, rather than sparking occasional episodes of genius followed by periods of creative blockage."—Library Journal

A stunning and inspiring meditation on design by an insightful practitioner. Schnaidt's take on creativity will delight your eyes with a breathtaking design and stimulate your thinking, offering a unique guidebook to fuel your work and personal best.—Robin Landa, Distinguished Professor, Kean University, and author of The New Art of Ideas

Bang! Kapow! Zowie! I cannot imagine a more knockout, more energetic, more useful, or more rewarding guide to building a creative life than this beautiful book. I just wish I had access to all of these stories and insights and anecdotes a whole lot earlier in my career. But I have it now and that helps me sleep better. Bravo, Mike.—Brian Collins, COLLINS

A serious compendium of thoughts, advice, personal stories, and complicated rituals that enable a broad group of designers to cope with those moments in careers when a good idea seems illusive. Every designer experiences this, and every designer can relate to both the struggles and satisfying solutions that are recounted within this book. Also, as a bonus, it happens to be beautifully designed.—Paula Scher, Partner Pentagram

Reading Creative Endurance is like having a supportive, design-savvy friend at your side to help work through creative roadblocks. Schnaidt’s advice is supported by essays and interviews with art directors, photographers, and illustrators as well as race car drivers, marathoners, and a host of others, taking a wide view of how humans summon their creative powers. The book’s beautiful page structure and information hierarchy draws from editorial magazine design: It’s fun for a reader to hop around between the smaller bites of information and longer passages of text. Each section is color-coded, making it a snap to separate the content into easily-absorbed lessons. Type-nerd alert: The typography is stunning!—Angela Riechers, Program Director of Graphic Design at University of the Arts

Mike Schnaidt does the impossible: He teaches you how to crush your goals while moving the mountains in front of you with wit and insight. It's like The Power of Positive Thinking meets The Little Engine That Could for creative people.—Anthony Giglio, author, sommelier and motivational speaker

I've borne witness to the author's best work emerging in the crucible of a midnight magazine close and consider him to be a creative partner of the highest caliber. This tome distills the ethos and impulse behind that regal beard and driven mindset—and applies it to conversations with an equally captivating cast. A must-read for anyone ambitious looking to chart a path through the sometimes messy, often exhilarating world of collaborative art.—Matt Bean, SVP Content and Performance, Tonal

Creative Endurance is conceptually unique and it keeps you hooked throughout. The layout, stories, and knowledge in it are a great source of inspiration to all. I personally love how this book celebrates creative individuality and embraces patience and perseverance as key values. The creative industry is not a ‘one size fits all’ scenario and this book understands that! This charmingly honest read is a must for your bookshelf.—James Martin, author of Made by James: The Honest Guide to Creativity and Logo Design

In Creative Endurance we see that creativity isn't just developed through hard work and discipline, but also by keeping an open mind, experimentation, and play. If your creativity seems trapped in a cage, Mike Schnaidt provides a key and, if you're like me, you come to understand that the door has been wide-open the entire time.—Dean Karnazes, NY Times bestselling author & ultramarathoner

Creative Endurance is sui generis: hard won wisdom, never before collected, directly from the minds of some of the most successful creative talents of our age.—Cliff Kuang, author of User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play

Creative Endurance is the rare book that is equal parts style and substance. It's as informative as it is pretty, and let me tell you: It is dang pretty.—Tim Leong, author of Super Graphic: A Visual Guide to the Comic Book Universe

Creative Endurance is an absolute must-read for anyone, in any field, who wants to be as generative at the age of 62 as they were at 26.—Brendan Vaughan, Editor in chief, Fast Company

Lucky reader, you are the beneficiary of Mike Schnaidt’s insatiable curiosity. I can’t think of many other books about creativity that include interviews with a nine-year-old and a seventy-six-year-old, a Black woman astronaut and a bank vice president. In Creative Endurance, Mike offers practical, digestible tips to help reenergize creatives—and just about anyone else who is feeling a bit blocked.—Stephanie Mehta, CEO, Mansueto Ventures

"Answers the question many creatives have: How do I succeed at my goals, manage the daily grind of life, and still take care of myself?"—COLOR Magazine

Creativity is a competitive sport with winners and losers. Mike Schnaidt has ingeniously found strategies to make creative performance productive, a relay race that succeeds when people match their desire with stamina.

—Steven Heller, writer, editor and co-chair emeritus SVA MFA Design

From the Publisher