Autor: Hana Kazazović

I could not tell you who is my favorite writer because I cannot choose just one from the lot of them I like. But I have a couple of writers whose books I read as soon as they publish them.

Scott Berkun is one of that writers and I just finished with reading his sixth book. He wrote seven books and I didn’t read just one – that one about project management, and it is probably just because I did not have it yet.

Scott’s last book is “The Dance of the Possible – the mostly honest and completely irreverent guide to creativity”. And as I wrote in my recommendation on Amazon and Goodreads for this book (yes, I am that kind of a reader :D ) – “when the student is ready, the teacher will appear” is my first thought after reading.

Why?

Because this book helped me to recognize what is the problem I’ve been struggling with for a last couple of months. Burnout – that is my problem and I did not even know it. I just feel empty and without energy, motivation and goals. When I read about the symptoms of burnout and recognized that I have three of five , I felt relief because I finally knew I am still normal :D Yes, that was something I really started to question.

“The Dance of the Possible” is a book that demystifies the process of creating something. One of the reasons I read so many Scott’s books is that he writes simple, interesting and with a lot of examples. Even when he writes about complicated things he does it in a way everybody could understand.

So, when he writes about creativity, you finally could understand every step of that process.

The most important lessons from this book for me would be:

Create is a verb. As Scott wrote in the book:

The word create is a verb. It’s an action. Creativity is best thought of in the same way-it’s something you can use while involved in an activity, like painting, writing, debating or dancing. If someone tells me they want to be more creative, I will immediately ask, “Creative in doing what?” which often gives them pause.

I realize this as one of my major problems. I cannot be creative while doing nothing. Creativity would not fall from the sky. I need to do something. And somewhere in that process the creativity will show up.

Perfection is an illusion

If you truly love your craft, there is an infinite number of projects in your future. There will be other chapters. There will be other canvases and other songs. Perfection is a prison and a selfmade one. Whatever you’re making, it doesn’t have to be perfect. Perfection is an illusion.

I am not such a perfectionist as I was earlier in my life. But, I still have some moments when I could not move on another thing because I think previous is not good enough. This is important to learn because “done is better than perfect”, as Sheryl Sandberg said.

This book is excellent choice for all the people who need to create some ideas in their lives. And I really could not tell you who do not need creativity in a life? It doesn’t matter if ideas are related to work or hobbies or some important project. Everybody could make some improvements in life if we add some creativity in it.

P.S. More information about this book you can find on http://scottberkun.com/2017/the-dance-of-the-possible/ I am on Scott’s mailing list so I was able to download it for free before of the rest of the world :)

P.P.S. I wrote earlier reviews about two Berkun’s books – “The Myths of Innovation” and “The Year Without Pants” (this one is in my native language but you can use Google Translate if you are interested in reading :)