The Torch Principle Blog Tour

Title: The Torch Principle
Author: Javier Ideami
Publisher: Sound of TouchGenre: Nonfiction/Pages: 404

Are you facing personal or professional challenges that require original and innovative solutions? Are you tired of the typical solutions that don't produce lasting results? Would you like to find a better balance between your creative and your analytical muscles in order to empower your career, health and well-being?

The Torch principle (Creativity) is a unique book + online platform (torchprinciple.com) that empowers your creative muscles and helps you generate original solutions to your personal and professional challenges. Award winning creative director Javier Ideami brings you a book plus an online all in one platform to empower your career, health and well-being through radically enhancing your creativity.

• Learn multisensory brainstorming techniques.
• Generate unique solutions to your personal and professional challenges.
• Reach a better balance between your analytical and your creative muscles.
• Empower your career, health and well-being through creative thinking.
• Get access to an online platform (torchprinciple.com) with videos, tools and graphics that help you visualize and understand the content as well as exercise your creative muscles.

The Torch Principle gives you the background knowledge you need combined with specific exercises and techniques that can help you find solutions and ideas for the personal and professional challenges you face. It also helps you reach a better balance between your analytical and your creative muscles. This, in turn, benefits your career, health and well-being.

We all have challenges, personal and professional. Typical solutions often don’t last and can’t adapt to the complexity of the situation we face or are ineffective against the competition. That’s why you need truly innovative and original solutions. You need to diverge strongly before you converge onto those solutions. To diverge strongly you need strong creative muscles. The Torch Principle gives you exercises to train your creative muscles and the tools to produce ideas and solutions that can overcome complexity and competition. Solutions that last.

For More Information

• The Torch Principle is available at Amazon.
• Discuss this book at PUYB Virtual Book Club at Goodreads.

If you live on planet Earth, there are many challenges you face, both personal and professional. Some of them are too complex to deal with by just using logic and analysis. In addition to this, typical conventional solutions are not practical because competitors are already implementing them or because the value they provide doesn’t last long enough.

In order to succeed, you need to raise your game and produce innovative, different and unique solutions to your personal and professional challenges. You cannot run a marathon without first training your body muscles regularly, similarly, you cannot become a master at innovating original solutions without first learning to exercise your creative muscles as well.

In this book I will show you how to make the transition from a personal or professional challenge to an innovative solution and how to exercise your creative muscles to become a master at this process.

We will also explore how creative thinking can benefit both your health and well-being.

Structure of the book

This first chapter is an introduction. The second chapter, “The electric mind”, introduces the theater of operations, our brain. The third chapter, “Two powerful friends”, covers the two key strategies our mind uses to process information: analytical and creative thinking. The fourth chapter, “Race for survival”, connects these two strategies with our biology and our transition from children to adults. The fifth chapter, “The torch principle”, guides you through the stages that occur in most successful innovation processes. The sixth chapter, “Exercising your creative muscles”, provides you with specific ways to train these muscles. Finally, chapter seven explores how creative strategies can benefit your health and well-being. The second part of the book includes 10 small chapters covering extra and complementary information that expands on some of the topics covered in the previous chapters. They delve deeper into storytelling, education, marketing, business, etc.

Welcome to the journey

Welcome to a fascinating journey. I acknowledge your courage and bravery in accepting this challenge, for the mission we are about to embark on is not for the faint-hearted. It has the potential to transform your career, health and well-being in dramatic ways.

Together, we will accomplish a fundamental change in the core and base of how you think and function.

The objectives of this book are clear. First, to make you a more balanced, complete and successful human being. Second, to help you raise yourself above the complexity and/or competition around you and find innovative solutions for the challenges you face both professionally and personally. We will focus on giving you practical exercises, strategies, tools and tips that you can apply during and after the reading.

Nowadays, complexity and competition are constant companions in our professional and personal lives. It is not enough to create a product or service that works. It is also not enough to use logic to manage professional and personal relationships. Their complexity requires a deeper approach.

Today, we need innovative solutions to our professional and personal challenges. To thrive and succeed in a given environment, to continue to stay on top of any situation, we need to first diverge in intelligent ways before we converge onto extraordinary solutions.

Getting there requires some effort. Nobody runs a marathon without training. We all understand the need to exercise our body muscles to be healthy. Likewise, we also need to exercise our creative mental muscles in order to be fit and ready to find innovative solutions to our challenges. In this book there are specific exercises and tools you can use to keep those creative muscles strong and supple.

Along the way I will have a companion with me. I believe in dialogue and interaction rather than long speeches. That’s why I will be interacting with my own mind (metaphorically speaking) as I go through the book.

Introducing dialogues is also a way to remind us that there is always a new perspective and angle on any topic, a new twist waiting for us around the corner. Keep an open mind and enjoy the journey. Every time our companion says something, it will be surrounded by double quotes.

“That’s me!”

That’s correct, thank you mind. Feel free to give us your perspective at any time please.

“Will do, this is fun!”

Thank you mind, I look forward to a great interaction!

This is an impressive volume of information and resources. I was amazed at how comprehensive and timely the references are. Years ago it took so long to get a book into print that the statistics and facts were history before they reached the consumer.  Besides the clear and easily followed concepts provided, this book is overflowing with weblinks and additional information.

Unlike most books of this kind, discussing creativity and problem solving, this book can be used with children as young as middle school. The only addition I would suggest is illustrations to send home the instruction via one extra type of learning.
At first I was not very fond of the "discussion" between the author and his own mind, finding some of the clarification questions and exclamations slightly annoying or amusing. If those were represented in simple stick illustrations I would have felt more positive about them.

I did fall into the two voice rhythm and see the advantages of the form.
In the beginning of the book we learn how best to make use of the resources included and basics about how our brains function, plus optimal ways to take advantage of all our brains can do.

I enjoyed the discussions about contrasts and strengths and the value of repetition, how it was stressed that everyone has the potential to be creative. I have not taken the time to attempt all of the exercises provided but I tried a few and am looking forward to doing more.

If you appreciate learning more about your brain and desire to stretch your creative boundaries, you will benefit greatly by picking up The Torch Principle.

I was provided with a copy of this book and the links for review purposes.

Javier Ideami is a multidisciplinary creative director, engineer, artist and entrepreneur. Javier is the founder of Ideami Studios and many other ventures all around the world, from Silicon Valley to the jungles of Bali. He has spoken at prestigious institutions, from Stanford University and UC Berkeley in California, to the United Nations FAO Headquarters, the financial center of London, the faculty of architecture of the University of Rome, the International Cultural Diplomacy Conference in Berlin and many others. He has received awards in areas as diverse as software engineering, music, filmmaking, photography, technology installations, etc.

His latest book is the nonfiction, The Torch Principle.

For More Information

• Visit Javier Ideami’s website.
• Connect with Javier on Facebook and Twitter.
• Find out more about Javier at Goodreads.