How Creativity Rules the World: The Art and Business of Turning Your Ideas into Gold

by Maria Brito

Overview

Axiom Business Book Award Winner in Entrepreneurship Category

Learn to make creativity work for your career.

Anyone, regardless of who you are or what you do, can cultivate the habits, actions, and attitudes that inspire creativity and innovation.

There has never been a more crucial time than now to develop your creativity and your ability to innovate. Coming up with original ideas of value is today’s most precious skill.

How Creativity Rules the World shows that, despite contrary beliefs, creativity can be taught and learned by anyone. Creativity is an inexhaustible resource that is the key to thriving in the business world and beyond. This timeless guide promises to make the creative process of successful seven-figure artists and billion-dollar entrepreneurs—as well as Maria’s own—accessible and actionable for you to take the power of their ideas to the next level.

In How Creativity Rules the World, you will learn how to:

• Overcome limiting thoughts and dispel myths about creativity.
• Unleash creativity through concrete data, historical passages, and examples of modern entrepreneurship.
• Develop timeless habits, principles, and tools that worked six centuries ago and continue to work today.
• Employ creativity in an everyday context to produce extraordinary results.

With revealing studies and stories spanning business and art, this book is a deep dive into history, culture, psychology, science, and entrepreneurship; analyzing the elements used by some of the most creative minds today and throughout the last 600 years.

Contemporary art curator and founder of The Groove, Maria Brito discovered the power of creativity when she transitioned from being an unhappy Harvard-trained corporate lawyer to a thriving entrepreneur and innovator in the art world. After applying the principles in How Creativity Rules the World to her own business, Maria started teaching them to hundreds of people, ranging from entrepreneurs to artists to CEOs. Proven by her students’ creative successes, Maria will guide you to strike gold with your ideas as well.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781400235384
Publisher:	HarperCollins Leadership
Publication date:	03/15/2022
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	585,528
Product dimensions:	9.10(w) x 6.20(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Maria Brito is a New York-based contemporary art advisor, author, and curator. She is a Harvard Law School graduate, originally from Venezuela. Brito was selected by Complex Magazine as one of the 20 Power Players in the Art World and she was named by ARTNEWS as “one of the innovators who gets to shape the art world.” She has written for publications such as Entrepreneur, HuffPost, Elle, Artnet, Forbes, Cultured Magazine, Departures, Goop, and The Gulf Coast Journal of Literature and Fine Arts from the University of Houston, Texas.

Maria has curated art exhibitions in three continents and also created and hosted The "C" Files with Maria Brito, a TV and streaming series for PBS's station ALL ARTS.

For several years, Maria has taught variations of her creativity class in companies and also designed and launched Jumpstart, a comprehensive online program on creativity for artists, freelancers, managers and entrepreneurs based on years of practical work, research, and observation in both the worlds of business and art.

She lives in New York City with her husband and two sons.

Table of Contents

Introduction vii

Part I The Intersection of Creativity, Art, and Business

1 Creativity and Crisis 3

2 Creativity and Artists: A Brief History 13

3 Dispelling Myths About Creativity 26

Part II Habits of the Mind

4 Beyond 20/20: Your Vision, Your Creativity, Your Success 41

5 Daring Convention: Creativity and Autonomy 54

6 Bringing the Inside Out: Creativity and Authenticity 64

7 Taking the Outside In: Creativity and Empathy 73

8 Curiosity: Reclaiming the Child's Mind 82

9 Silence and Solitude: A Room of One's Own 93

10 Intuition: Your Gut Knows What Your Mind Doesn't 100

11 Daydreaming: The Earthly Delights of Dreaming with Open Eyes 111

12 Risk-Taking: Creativity Abhors Complacency 120

13 Improvise: Jazz Things Up 131

14 Embrace Failure: When Disappointment Breeds Innovation 139

Part III Tools of the Trade

15 Deconstruct: Break It Down 151

16 Aggregate: See the Big Picture 158

17 Repeat: The More You Do It, the More Original It Gets 164

18 Creative Tension: When Opposites Attract 172

19 Cross-Pollination: Fertile Ground for Creativity 180

20 The Analog Method: Use Your Hands to Access Your Brain 187

Part IV The Way Forward

21 Mixing Intuition and Rationality: Balancing Premonition and Logic 195

22 Collaboration: 2 + 2 = 5 203

23 Connect the Dots: Piecing the Puzzle Together 212

24 Pivot: The Only Constant Is Change 222

25 Inventing the Future: Keeping Two Steps Ahead 230

Epilogue 243

Acknowledgments 245

Sources and References 247

Index 263

About the Author 271

Editorial Reviews

02/14/2022

Creativity isn’t just for artists, argues curator Brito (Out There) in this punchy look at the mindsets and skills necessary for innovation. As she writes, “every breakthrough in every industry... comes from people who used their creativity to think differently,” and by examining successes in both business and art, she shows readers how to “turn the mundane into the extraordinary.” Gustav Klimt’s career exemplifies the importance of dipping into more than one area, as he drew from fields including biology and decorative arts to spearhead Vienna’s modernist movement. Innovators at Finnish tech company Polar did something similar when they combined industrial design and medical equipment to develop the precursor to the smartwatch in the 1960s. Coco Chanel made use of a principle Brito calls “combining opposites” in mixing masculine and feminine fashion, and Frank Wang combined opposites, too, when he used an “old camera” for a “new invention” in creating the camera drone in 2006. Each chapter ends with an “Alchemy Lab” exercise meant to help readers integrage the principles into their own lives by doing such things as accepting projects outside one’s comfort zone and setting aside some time every day to think. Those looking to spark some creativity will find this worth a look. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

'Creative entrepreneur Maria Brito has written a primer on how to unleash and build on our creative potential. Through fascinating case studies and her own career trajectory, she shows how innovators have harnessed their creativity through techniques like improvisation, aggregation, and juxtaposition of opposite concepts. In addition to providing useful examples of creative strategies, the book gives us an absorbing history of creative accomplishment.'

Los Angeles Jeffrey Deitch Gallerist and former director of the Museum of Contemporary Art

'Interesting, revealing and soulful, 'How Creativity Rules The World' brings something powerful to those who are already creative and to those who want to improve their creativity and their ideas'

Puma June Ambrose Creative Director

'How Creativity Rules The World is one of the most fascinating reads on how to harness our immense creative power in business and in life. Maria Brito does a brilliant job, with candor and humor, at demonstrating that we all have everything we need to become innovators, disruptors and changemakers.'

Meredith Corporation Catherine Levene President

'Not an artist or an entrepreneur? Not a problem. We all have original ideas, and this user-friendly guide shows how to access them and put them to work.'

People Magazine

'Maria Brito has crafted a first-rate guide to creativity that explodes the many myths about the topic and places this elusive ability within anyone's grasp. If you're looking to get unstuck, this is a book for you.'

Daniel H. Pink #1 New York Times bestselling author of WHEN

The Argentinian native and former corporate attorney sounds knowledgeable and confident as she performs this historically detailed audiobook on the power of creativity. She studied art history, so the work is full of sparkling stories spanning 600 years about how painters and other artists developed their creativity and discovered fascinating ways to achieve commercial success. These stories and those of many well-known entrepreneurs illustrate the mental processes and attitudes Maria Brito wants her listeners to understand and develop. Her steady and authentic-sounding performance works well in delivering this impressive advice. With a touch of humility, she conveys magnetic independence as a writer and speaker. The audiobook draws listeners into her world, making her ideas and suggestions sound accessible and motivating. T.W. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

OCTOBER 2022 - AudioFile

The Argentinian native and former corporate attorney sounds knowledgeable and confident as she performs this historically detailed audiobook on the power of creativity. She studied art history, so the work is full of sparkling stories spanning 600 years about how painters and other artists developed their creativity and discovered fascinating ways to achieve commercial success. These stories and those of many well-known entrepreneurs illustrate the mental processes and attitudes Maria Brito wants her listeners to understand and develop. Her steady and authentic-sounding performance works well in delivering this impressive advice. With a touch of humility, she conveys magnetic independence as a writer and speaker. The audiobook draws listeners into her world, making her ideas and suggestions sound accessible and motivating. T.W. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

OCTOBER 2022 - AudioFile