The Creativity Choice

Celebrating the Creativity and Innovation Day

Today is the UN Creativity and Innovation Day. Never heard of it? My dear colleague Dr. Keith Sawyer has a terrific post about its history that you can access here. In a way of a personal celebration, I want to take a look back to my (almost) published book, The Creativity Choice, share the excitement of finally holding the book in my hands, and tell you why you might want to pre-order it.

This was a rollercoaster ride

It was just about two years ago when I signed a book contract with PublicAffairs/Hachette. At the time, the working title for the book was The Creativity Decision and I a while later I started this newsletter with the same title. The book went through many changes. The process started with one editor and ended with another one. Chapters that I thought would be the easiest to write because they were at the core of my own research ended up being quite challenging. Others were unexpectedly easier. And the title changed.

As is usual with creative work that takes a long time to develop and bring to a conclusion, this process was an emotional rollercoaster. It would not occur to me to go on a rollercoaster ride, like at a Six Flags park, for instance, where the point of the ride is the rollercoaster itself. But I love the Jurassic Park at Universal Studios. That rollercoaster ride is in the service of the story and the discomfort or fright are something I can and am willing to tolerate.

Taking the book out of the box (pun intended)

After two years of the book writing and preparing ride, I have finally received my physical copies in the mail. The unboxing videos are a bit of a cliché, but the excitement is real. And a moment of pause and reflection too.

The publication date is around the corner – May 6. But the book is available for pre-order at your preferred book buying sites. The biggies like amazon or Barnes and Noble, and Bookshop.org to connect with your favorite independent bookstore.

The book is getting some nice attention. In many ways the most personally meaningful endorsement I got was from Marina Udier,

“As a scientist-turned-biotech CEO, I never thought of myself as ‘creative’ until I read The Creativity Choice. This book challenged my views and beliefs, illustrating how small decisions and persistence can lead to transformative ideas and actions, much like scaling a startup. Pringle masterfully blends personal stories, cultural insights, and the role of emotions in daily life to illuminate the science behind turning ideas into action. She offers an inspiring and practical guide for anyone who seeks to harness creativity.”

If someone who is so exceptionally creative and accomplished like Marina – Yale Ph.D. in chemistry, management consultant, and now a CEO of a company working on vaccines for cancer – did not think of herself as creative, but came to appreciate the creativity in her work, I have succeeded in ways in which I aspired to.

I wrote this book because I have noticed people tell me they are not creative because they are not artistic. I wrote it because it can be overwhelming to get started when we are bombarded with misleading messages of what creativity is what we need to make it happen (You have to be confident! You have discover your passion! You have to be fearless!). The reality is that what matters most is to get started. You gain confidence in the process, you develop passions, and you manage the fear or discomfort.

I’ve spent much of my career studying the emotional side of creativity. This might seem paradoxical. Creativity studies as a scientific discipline emerged from the cognitive revolution and were grounded in the study of divergent and convergent thinking processes when generating and evaluating ideas. But creativity is not just about having ideas, it is also about doing something with them. I argue that creativity is primarily about doing something with ideas because otherwise it stays in the domain of imagination and fantasy, a set of processes in our brains or minds that don’t make it out.

The Creativity Choice gives you the building blocks for that kind of long-term creative process. It helps you get started, introduces tools to help you stay strapped on the rollercoaster ride and emerge at the other end in one piece, and draws you attention to the sometimes hidden social nature of creativity. And it is social even when the creative action itself is solitary (like writing a book).

Why might you want to pre-order

When you pre-order the book, you get it as soon as it is available. And you don’t have to remember ordering it once it is officially published. It is one thing less on your to do list. If you are anything like me, you sometimes intent to do something, but then space out. Because life.

Of course, I would say you should pre-order. Pre-orders are important for authors. They create buzz. They tell retailers and media to pay attention.

But those are the benefits for me as the author. What can you get for pre-ordering? Here is the list:

1. Live book club with the author (to quote the fabulous Miss Piggy, MOI!)

2. Exclusive content, including a free e-book (a different book! not just an e-version of The Creativity Choice)

3. Assessments of key psychological resources discussed in The Creativity Choice

So, consider pre-ordering. Keep a proof of pre-order, and sign up for additional content here.