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A few days ago I purchased and read Marelisa Fábrega’s ebook entitled How to Be More Creative – A Handbook for Alchemists.

The best books to read aren’t necessarily nation-wide best sellers. That does not make Marelisa an amateur, she is a popular blogger on the creativity theme and has years worth of research, leisure reading, writing and practice on the subject. She also has top-rated Squidoo lenses (<100) and a long-time readership.

Three Things that Stand Out.

The first is the writing. Marelisa is from Panama, so one can only assume that English isn’t her native language. It isn’t mine either, but my writing is nothing special. You can come back and check on that once in a while for the next few years, I will surely get better

Content is great, but when it is well written, it permeates. You remember more, are struck with more images, and ultimately are able to apply more without having to reread.

Nonetheless, content there is, and a lot of it, so printing and binding the ebook, as well as interacting with it as instructed is highly recommended.

Then there are the references. Where else can you expect to learn creativity secrets and insights from many great minds as Mark Twain, Isaac Asimov, Guy Kawasaki, Stephen King, Leonardo da Vinci, Machiavelli… And many others I hadn’t ever heard about. If you were to search the internet for such wide-ranging views on creativity, you would miss out on many.

There are also a heap of online references. Links to interactive tools and exercises, as well as further content sources that illustrate her own. Great finds for future exploration that you would miss otherwise, and that would be a shame.

Then comes the technique. You’ll come back often to explore further and apply it, because it is fun and rewarding. A few days isn’t nearly enough for me to describe the full potential, but I have made great progress already. For this blog alone, as well as my other projects, ideas and actions have been flowing easier, and I see things going much further as time passes.

Like many great resources, this is one you will want to keep close by if you have a mind to doing more, better things in the near future.

Click here to visit Abundance Blog at Marelisa Online. and get your own handbook for alchemists!

Remember that alchemists were those that turned lead into gold. Learn to create value for yourself, and others, with just what is available to you. Regardless of how insignificant it may seem at first, you have more potential than you think!

Puppy prepared to play!

 Don’t underestimate the power of a playful break!

Just a stick will do for a few good laughs.

When one of those breaks ends, the following hours of work will be more creative, and more productive. It never fails!

Enjoyed this post? Please take a minute to browse the tools that make me better. They will work for you too, so buying one is a great win-win way to support this site!

If this is your first visit, have a good look around! Lots of fun, creativity, productivity… And subscribe for upcoming posts – there is a lot more coming!

Whether you want to take your hobby to the next level, add a string to your bow for your career, or perhaps learn a new language, the way you go about it from the start will make the difference between a real learning experience and a passing whim that yields little or no results.

Method and planning work, but without knowledge, you cannot build or plan.

It isn’t about research, but preparation.

Of course some research will always be necessary. But it isn’t central. Research can lead to piles of information, and most of the gathered information will be unnecessary.

Study is a more adequate word for the information phase, because studying will lead to understanding. Understanding prepares you for the challenge, while knowledge will better suit shallow conversation than real progress.

Tim Ferriss calls this preparatory study phase deconstruction, and applies it to linguistics. Read his quick post on this and you will see the difference between research (buying vocabulary and grammar books, and digging in for 10 000 hours), and actual preparatory study method. He applies similar principles to sports competition and describes this in his book, The 4-Hour Work Week, telling how he won the Chinese national kickboxing championships with little preparation, and a starting level of expertise that should have made this impossible.

Deconstruction applied to weight loss.

The weight loss plan (see above menu) is the result of the very same principle: understand first, applied to fat loss biology. I actually ran into Tim’s site for the first time while checking my Google rankings for fat loss, and found his post on this subject in the first three results (Understandfatloss.com was on page 5).

The conclusions are practically the same, and the results: deconstructing and understanding has led us both to our target weights whereas most people (myself included, years before) give up on weight loss because they put too much practice (restriction, workouts) into poorly thought-out methods (eat less and exercise doesn’t work!).

Then comes practice and learning, but also luck and opportunity.

Once you’ve understood enough on the mechanics to build a method, the gaps to fill in with knowledge have dramatically shrunk, and that is the whole point of the operation.

That doesn’t mean to say that there is no practice and learning involved, just that the requirement has shrunk enough to be much easier to plan and evaluate. And evaluating a project’s cost in time, effort and sometimes financial investment is crucial to determining whether or not it is worth the benefit in comparison with other project ideas.

Dustin Wax puts more emphasis on the actual practice in his recent post on luck, success, and 10 000 hours, but does not forget the preparatory phase which he refers to as absorbing the rules.

A jet fighter pilot will definitely need thousands of hours of flight to integrate essential reflexes that can save his life, deconstruction or not. And this will require luck as well. If he is unlucky he will run into that demanding situation after only 500 hours of flight, and never have the opportunity to put in the 10 000.

Yes, there will be learning, and how good a shortcut you can find will depend on the goal, but also the amount of thought and creativity (creative thinking, problem solving) you put into the deconstruction. A challenging but worthwhile process to master, which requires some deconstruction, learning and practice of its own.