Creative pursuits like art and music feel inherently risky to most people, so they avoid them as career choices.  The common portrayal of the “starving artist” doesn’t do much to sell the idea either.

What we know is that most people want more opportunities to be creative in their careers.  Jonathan Fields‘ book Uncertainty speaks to that desire, though you may not initially like his solution.

I don’t do a lot of book reviews because honestly, there aren’t too many nonfiction books that impress me.  Fields’ book happens to be one of them.

The basic premise of the book is that you must embrace fear (as opposed to overcome it) in order to really spark your creative fire.  In addition to summarizing a lot of research on the subject, he also provides an abundance of case studies, highlighting how creativity is at the heart of brilliance in nearly any career field: science, entrepreneurship, even investment banking.

In this post, I’ll highlight a few of the big ideas introduced in the book and some of the tactics he proposes to put this all into practice.  I’ll also reveal how a few fear-embracers can read it for free.

As most of you know, I’ve been doing a lot of self-analysis lately, trying to dream up my dream job.  It’s not easy.  Because I don’t want just any job–in fact, I don’t want a job at all.  I want to wake up like Steve Jobs and successfully answer the question, “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?”

In order to arrive at that mythical place, you have to know what to commit to.  That is, what attributes of your future are must-haves, outside the realm of compromise?  One of the big absolutes for me was finding a profession that frequently tapped my creativity.  Hey, I’m a poet and a writer, so that idea seemed like a no brainer.

But wait!  It turns out there are two kinds of creatives, and before you design that dream job, you’d better know which one you are. 

I was recently invited to give a talk about the relationship between creativity and science at the Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition.  In particular, the organizer wanted me to structure my talk around some of my science-themed poems. 

It seems some of the scientists there were rather intrigued by the whole idea.