Cracking the Creativity Code: Zoom in/Zoom out/Zoom in Framework for Creativity, Fun, and Success

by Arie Ruttenberg, Shlomo Maital

Creativity is an acquired skill, one that improves with practice. Cracking the Creativity Code shows you how!

This book provides a proven method for generating world-changing ideas. It empowers individuals who have given up on their innate creativity, who believe that they have lost their creative powers through years of disuse.

In a light, entertaining style, the authors describe their unique, structured approach to creativity. To bring the reader closer to this lost art, the authors present a ‘Zoom in, Zoom out, Zoom in’ technique to make ‘creation’ more accessible to everyone.

Reinvigorate your personal creativity machines―once turned on, it will generate an unending stream of novel ideas that can change the world.

168 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Arie Ruttenberg, is a co-founder of Israel's largest advertising agency, McCann Erickson Ltd.

Reviews

[MoYaL · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book starts with the last chapter and that is a way to show your creativity. Ruttenberg and Maital, both qualified and experienced individual having knowledge about their individual fields have wove the book quite nicely in their own creative ways. There are around 8 chapters in the book which are nicely fabricated and placed and are filled with various stories of famous individuals, businessman, artists and their incidents where they used their creative approach to become successful or you can say opened new doors of options is their lives. They have even cited numerous studies done by psychologists and neurologists if the reader is skeptical about their writings.

To practice creativity the authors have shared their method called Zi-Zo-Zi Approach. I will brief you guys and share the three steps involved in it-

1. Zi (Zoom In) - The creative process begins with Zoom In i.e In-depth study of the domain of the problem and in-depth observation of the phenomenon that interests us.
2. Zo (Zoom Out) - To use our imaginations, in trying to imagine as many alternatives or choices
(bad or good) as possible to tackle a problem and the purposeful innovations we intentionally discovered.
3. Zi (Zoom In) - And finally to focus on every idea and to critique it from every possible angle and choose the pragmatic ones from them for implementation.

My favorite takeaways from the book are:
1. It is better to ask questions without answers than to have answers that cannot be questioned - Richard Feynman.
2. If you want true creativity, knock down two zeroes from your budget- Jamie Lerner
3. I don't make movies to make money, I make money to make movies- Walt Disney
4. Today, mass production is disappearing and mass customization is taking its place. People express their personalities through what they consume and buy.
5. If you give-up on small things, you will likely give up on big things as well.
6. Habits are the sworn enemies of creativity.
7. Eliminate the unnecessary, so the necessary can speak.
8. A paper accepts absolutely anything.
9. If you can learn to read, then you can read to learn.
10. If you know exactly what you are going to do- what is the point of doing it - Picasso

I had lot of fun reading this book. Hope you guys also have the same enjoyment.

[Marks Calderón Niquin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Creativity = risky

[Natu Lauchande · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting views and tools to understand to trigger the generation of the creative process.