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Creative Doing: 75 Practical Exercises to Unblock Your Creative Potential in Your Work, Hobby, or Next Career
Have you ever felt frustrated, blocked, or unable to make progress on a creative pursuit? Or felt that your creative potential may not be realized in your work?
This book was written to honor and support the emerging artist and creative. Driven by a desire to uncover the mystery of the creative process, writer Herbert Lui spent a decade researching and in conversation with practicing artists and creatives of all kinds.
What emerged is this elegant collection of exercises, mental models, and true stories that help you develop your own creative process, from choosing material to sharing your work with the world. Creative Doing is often counterintuitive, prompting you to try one thing, and then its opposite, or pushing you to “sell out” as you experiment with creative purpose.
The techniques apply to writers, painters, designers, musicians, digital creatives, producers, consultants, or anyone who wishes to develop a consistent creative habit. You might be…
- wanting to tap into your creativity to find new solutions in your full-time work
- exploring a creative hobby outside of your day job
- leaving or considering leaving a job to focus on new creative work.
The 75 practical techniques in this book support you as you learn to turn your vaguest impulses into true expression.
This book was written to honor and support the emerging artist and creative. Driven by a desire to uncover the mystery of the creative process, writer Herbert Lui spent a decade researching and in conversation with practicing artists and creatives of all kinds.
What emerged is this elegant collection of exercises, mental models, and true stories that help you develop your own creative process, from choosing material to sharing your work with the world. Creative Doing is often counterintuitive, prompting you to try one thing, and then its opposite, or pushing you to “sell out” as you experiment with creative purpose.
The techniques apply to writers, painters, designers, musicians, digital creatives, producers, consultants, or anyone who wishes to develop a consistent creative habit. You might be…
- wanting to tap into your creativity to find new solutions in your full-time work
- exploring a creative hobby outside of your day job
- leaving or considering leaving a job to focus on new creative work.
The 75 practical techniques in this book support you as you learn to turn your vaguest impulses into true expression.
- GenresNonfictionArtSelf Help
120 pages, ebook
First published May 16, 2022
10 people are currently reading
248 people want to read
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January 13, 2026
Don't be fooled by Creative Doing's just over 100 pages: It's so dense with insight, I spent nine months reading it. This book is like a daily inspo calendar to unblock your creativity, and it works brilliantly.
I don't believe in writer's block, and I rarely lack inspiration, but every time I picked up this book, I found some great idea or interesting new perspective I wanted to sit with and reflect on. So I put the book aside, perhaps wrote about it on my daily blog, and revisited it later. Hence, nine months of reading—and highlights on every single page.
Herbert backs up his own curated advice with over 1,000 entries in his daily blog, by the way. Unlike many others in the space, Lui walks the walk before he talks the talk.
Herbert covers creative work in 3 parts: starting, maintaining momentum, and sustaining your creative purpose. Each section is filled with both out-of-the-box examples as well as familiar references and reminders to some of our literary, musical, and cinephile greats.
Having honed his taste in the arts over many years, Herbert's own points of view are also insightful. My famous moments were discovering those when they were tucked away in the fringes of the pages. A half-sentence here, a short line there, but wow! Did you know you can make chance your ally? That your hands don't have an ego?
There's a beautiful hardcover edition of this beautiful book, which I've given as a gift several times. I highly recommend you treat yourself to the same—and, in doing so, support a rare breed: a dedicated, thoughtful, independent writer!
I don't believe in writer's block, and I rarely lack inspiration, but every time I picked up this book, I found some great idea or interesting new perspective I wanted to sit with and reflect on. So I put the book aside, perhaps wrote about it on my daily blog, and revisited it later. Hence, nine months of reading—and highlights on every single page.
Herbert backs up his own curated advice with over 1,000 entries in his daily blog, by the way. Unlike many others in the space, Lui walks the walk before he talks the talk.
Herbert covers creative work in 3 parts: starting, maintaining momentum, and sustaining your creative purpose. Each section is filled with both out-of-the-box examples as well as familiar references and reminders to some of our literary, musical, and cinephile greats.
Having honed his taste in the arts over many years, Herbert's own points of view are also insightful. My famous moments were discovering those when they were tucked away in the fringes of the pages. A half-sentence here, a short line there, but wow! Did you know you can make chance your ally? That your hands don't have an ego?
There's a beautiful hardcover edition of this beautiful book, which I've given as a gift several times. I highly recommend you treat yourself to the same—and, in doing so, support a rare breed: a dedicated, thoughtful, independent writer!
Displaying 1 of 1 review