**Realize Your Abundance of Creativity Resources**

Sometimes it's easy to forget that creativity boosters surround us. I know that when I want to "get ideas," I'm prone to go looking in the bookstore, looking online at other people's work, or otherwise trying to go outside my own life to find creativity resources.

I've even been known to take a non-credit online writing class just for the creativity booster, even if I'm not particularly interested in the class per se.

What I've come to realize lately is that there are so many creativity resources right in my everyday life, sometimes right inside my office (which I seldom venture out of) that I could get by, creatively, and even thrive creatively, without ever once stepping foot into the "outside world" again, in search of creativity resources.

Of course, it's fun to get outside myself, and I hope I always have the opportunity to get "out there" and boost my creativity through channels outside my own immediate experience.

But what I want to remember, and what I hope you'll get from this article series, is that it's not *necessary* to venture far and wide in search of ideas and creative nourishment. Sometimes it's fun, sometimes it's easier, but it's not required.

Creative help and creativity resources are all around you. In fact, I bet you've got one on your desk. Let's see, shall we?

**Books**

Okay, I know you're going to say this one is obvious. But maybe not so much.

Typically, when I'm trying to get an idea, I go to a book that's related to what I'm doing. Seems logical, right?

For instance, if I'm working on a brochure for my book, I might pick up a book on designing brochures. I might go to the library and get some books showcasing brochure designs by major designers. I look for creative seeds in places I'd expect to find them.

But let's look at a real-life scenario, from my real life just a couple of weeks ago.

I was doing the typesetting and page layout for my book, The Leonardo Trait: Living the Multipassionate Life. It's a self-help book on creativity.

I was not completely happy with the interior layout, so I wanted to see what other books looked like inside.

I spent about an hour at the library leafing through self-help books and checking out ones that had interesting "insides." I found some I liked, but nothing that really rang my chimes, so to speak.

While I was working on this project, I was also working with my son on a prospective video game project.

When I got home with my pile of interestingly insided books, I sat down to read up on video game design.

And that's where I found the interior design I wanted - in a book on video games.

It's tempting to look for ideas in familiar places. But sometimes, just picking up a book at random can give us that great idea we've been looking for.

My favorite technique with books comes, I think, from Roger Von Oech, the "Whack on the Side of the Head" guy.

You pick a book, and three numbers. The first number is a page number. Say, 176. The second number is the line number, say 10. The third number is the word number, say 4.

That particular formula would lead you to word 5 on line 10 of page 176.

Your assignment is to take that word and come up with a way to connect it to your project. Give yourself an idea.

[End of Part 1]