3 books for “Shapers” to spark your inspiration

22 Jan 3 books for “Shapers” to spark your inspiration

Are you looking for some light reading? To get inspired? To take a deep dive into some future trends or to tap into your creativity?

Flex your mind muscles and your imagination with the books below. We read them, loved them, totally recommend them!

Here are some quotes from them:

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, by Yuval Noah Harari

The most common reaction of the human mind to achievement is not satisfaction, but craving for more. Having secured unprecedented levels of prosperity, health and harmony, and given our past record and our current values, humanity’s next targets are likely to be immortality, happiness and divinity.

As long as all Sapiens living in a particular locality believe in the same stories, they all follow  the same rules, making it easy to predict the behavior of strangers and to organize mass-cooperation networks. Sapiens often use visual marks such as a turban, a beard or a business suit to signal ‘you can trust me, I believe in the same story as you’. Our chimpanzee cousins cannot invent and spread such stories, which is why they cannot cooperate in large numbers. Sapiens rule the world because only they can weave an inter-subjective WEB OF MEANING: a web of laws, forces, entities and places that exist purely in their COMMON IMAGINATION.

Stories serve as the foundations and pillars of human societies. As history unfolded, stories about gods, nations and corporations grew so powerful that they began to dominate objective reality.

Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, by Elizabeth Gilbert

I’m talking about living a life that is driven more strongly by curiosity than by fear.

A creative life is an amplified life. It’s a bigger life, a happier life, an expanded life, and a hell of a lot more interesting life. Living in this manner—continually and stubbornly bringing forth the jewels that are hidden within you—is a fine art, in and of itself.

Most of all, though, he asked his students to be brave. Without bravery, he instructed, they would never be able to realize the vaulting scope of their own capacities. Without bravery, they would never know the world as richly as it longs to be known. Without bravery, their lives would remain small—far smaller than they probably wanted their lives to be.

You do not need anybody’s permission to live a creative life.

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, by Adam Grant

The hallmark of originality is rejecting the default and exploring whether a better option exists. We’re driven to question defaults when we experience vuja de, the opposite of deja vu. Deja vu occurs when we encounter something new, but it feels as if we’ve seen it before. Vuja de is the reverse – we face something familiar, but we see it with a fresh perspective that enables us to gain new insights into old problems.

As I’ve studied originals, I’ve learned that the advantages of acting quickly and being first are often outweighed by the disadvantages. It’s true that the early bird gets the worm, but we can’t forget that the early worm gets caught… when you put off a task, you buy yourself time to engage in divergent thinking rather than foreclosing on one particular idea. As a result, you consider a wider range of original concepts and ultimately choose a more novel direction.

“Shapers” are driven, imaginative, independent thinkers: curious, non-conforming, and rebellious. They practice brutal, non-hierarchical honesty. And they act in the face of risk, because their fear of not succeeding exceeds their fear of failing. The greatest shapers don’t stop at introducing originality into the world. They create cultures to unleash originality in others.