Review of DIE EMPTY by Todd Henry

I loved Todd Henry's ACCIDENTAL CREATIVE, and it's a book I return to again and again. His latest book DIE EMPTY is about living the kind of life that, when we finally leave this world, we'll know we poured out our best. It's about getting the ideas we have out of our heads and make them a reality.  Dying empty is about not hanging onto our ideas and waiting for perfection before we execute.

Henry's book is great because he seems to genuinely live out the principles he lays out in the book. He talks about the three kinds of work we should be doing to be continually productice, and he gives practical tips for overcoming the natural tendency toward procrastination that many creatives experience.

Like THE ACCIDENTAL CREATIVE, DIE EMPTY is designed to encourage productivity, and it does a great job.

Review copy provided by Portfolio Hardcover

Photo Credit: Portfolio Hardcover

Killing the Art of Procrastination

I've always loved to read, but I can think of one instance when I hated reading. I think I was in second or third grade, and I had to do a book report on a Hardy Boys book. On the day before it was due, my parents discovered that I hadn't read a single page of the book I was supposed to review. I'm not real sure what my plan was. Maybe I was going to just make up what the story was about. What were the chances that the teacher had read that same story, after all? Plus, making up my own stories has always been more fun anyway. But my parents decided that if I had to review this book, then I needed to actually read it.

So they made me read it...

...all evening long...

...until I finished.



Every word began to feel like acid splashed on my eyes. Instead of playing Nintendo or rearranging my baseball cards for the one hundredth time, I had to read what was going on in the Hardy Boys' world. Who are the Hardy Boys anyway? To this day, I have no idea what I read or what my book report was about.

I wish I could say this was the last time I've ever put something off until the last minute. Many people struggle with what author Steven Pressfield calls resistance. Resistance is a force that automatically starts pressing in on us the moment we know that we have to do something important that requires any sort of creative thought, or that might require any degree of risk of criticism.

It's the voice that whispers, "You can always wait to do it later," when you know you have homework to do, when you want to write a novel, when you want to start a business, when you need to fix the dishwasher (speakiing of, I need to fix our dishwasher, but maybe I can do it later), when you want to become a better parent or spouse, when you need to pray or read the Bible, when you need to change something critical in your life, and any other project you can imagine either wanting to do or feeling responsible to do.

Last week, I wrote about creating courage in other people. Resistance is the enemy of courage. Though there's so much we need to do to live life to the fullest, we often lack the courage to silence the voice of resistance.

In Romans 7, though Paul is talking specifically about our ability to live rightly, what he describes is exactly where resistance comes from. We're truly our own worst enemies, and it is us, our fears, and our bad habits that stop us from doing what we need and want to do. Paul says, "For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate...For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out...I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members" (Rom. 7:15, 18, 23).

However irrational it is, the feeling of resistance often gives us the sense that what we're about to tackle is impossible. So we have to do what is impossible before we have time to realize it's impossible. We have to silence the resistance early on, before it has a chance to talk us out of doing what needs to be done. Jon Acuff talks about this in his book QUITTER in relation to chasing our dreams. We can't give our resistance the time to get into our heads and give us all the reasons why we shouldn't do what we're about to do.

We have to act.

We can't procrastinate.

We have to be proactive.

We have to be diligent.

We have to put our resistance to death.

"A slack hand causes poverty, but the hand of the diligent makes rich" (Prov. 10:4)

What are some methods you use to avoid procrastination?

Photo Credit: alancleaver_2000 / Alan Cleaver on Flickr.com Creative Commons

Focusing Your Creative Process: A Review of THE ACCIDENTAL CREATIVE by Todd Henry

For years I’ve wanted to write, which means that a significant part of my life is dependent upon generating new and important ideas on a consistent basis.  But anyone who is a creative knows how difficult it is sometimes to come up with good ideas at a moment’s notice.  And for many, the ability to come up with ideas at a moment’s notice is vitally important to the success of their professional work.

Into the midst of this tension comes a phenomenal new book about the creative process by Todd Henry—THE ACCIDENTAL CREATIVE.  The book focuses on developing a creative rhythm, centered around the following five practices and represented by the acronym FRESH:

• Focus
• Relationships
• Energy
• Stimuli
• Hours

There is a lot to love about this book and a lot of helpful insights to put into practice.  In the chapter on Focus, Henry recommends that creatives work through challenges, or “positioning project objectives in the form of questions designed to surround the problem.”  These help you to be “focused on specifics rather than generalities.”  I love this approach.  It’s exactly the approach I took last summer when I began writing my first novel.  I approached the story problems by asking and answering focused questions.  To consistently generate the most relevant ideas for the project we’re working on, we need the kind of focus this practice provides.

Another thing I loved about the book was that each of the practices are really about focusing our creative process and eliminating the things that keep us from being the most creative on a consistent basis.  Creatives don’t often consider how their energy level affects their ability to generate ideas.  Henry points out that without monitoring our energy, we’re eventually going to hit a wall that will force us to stop our creative rhythm.  This can be very costly when your energy level is depleted at the moment when you need to generate ideas the most.

The chapter on stimuli may be the most important for developing a rhythm that generates the kind of ideas we really want.  We want to control the kind of stimuli we’re exposed to and focus in on the stimuli that are most helpful to producing the kind of results we’re looking for.  Henry’s advice on how to keep a notebook to take notes and record ideas in was something I put into practice immediately after I read the book, and it has been immediately helpful to my creative rhythm.

There are books that promise to be helpful, and then there are books that are so insightful that you can’t wait to start putting the book’s ideas into practice.  THE ACCIDENTAL CREATIVE is an immediately helpful book for developing a healthy, results-oriented rhythm to creativity.