The Imagination Muscle

Product Information

One of the best exercises for the imagination is the “What if” game. Through daily practice you train yourself to ask “What if X?” in response to the stimuli—usually visual—that come your way in an ordinary day.

Spanning pre-historic times through to the twenty-first century, Albert and Will will explore to explore the genesis of ideas – from Thomas Edison’s serial embracing of failure to Jane Jacobs’ vision of how we should build cities together; from Steve Jobs’ approach to office design to the Japanese concept of Ma. They’ll teach us how to discover where to find ideas, how to foster skill in observation and connection, and how to be more attentive to the fluxes of our own minds. Speaking more about Leonardo da Vinci, he said: “While he was painting the Mona Lisa, he would paint it during the day. And then at night, he would go to this mortuary in Florence, and he dissected cadavers. And he would study very, very closely, the way a smile works and the way that the curve of a nostril is delineated. So he took his scientific learnings and really took art to the next level by really understanding the muscular makeup of the face.” After all, as Read expertly outlines, the imagination is our supreme gift, our biggest opportunity, our greatest source of fulfilment and our most vital asset for the future. Albert told Chris: “I think that's the lesson we all have to learn is we should all widen our perspectives, read things that we wouldn't necessarily normally read. Read differently, don't read one book and then another book. Read different books at the same time. So there are lots of ideas from history which I think need to be revived and brought to the fore.”Touching on art, music, film, literature, science and entrepreneurship, Albert joins How To Academy to examine how the imagination has evolved through the millennia, and how you can nurture and cultivate your own creativity.

I’ve often thought of the imagination as a muscle. With proper care and exercise, it gets stronger. Leave it alone, and it atrophies.The book answers questions such as: What techniques can we use to stimulate imaginative thinking? How can we learn to foster skill in observation and connection? Giving some examples, Albert said: “The obvious ones that we all know about are having ideas in the shower. So, someone like Aaron Sorkin, who writes The West Wing, when he's writing, he has five showers a day, because he keeps his mind going. It loosens the mind, It has this loosening quality, having a shower. Going for long walks, something invented by the Romantic poets. They realised that if you walk, you have ideas. Touching on art, music, film, literature, science and entrepreneurship, this book examines how the imagination has evolved - in shape, power and pace - through the millennia. Albert, who began his career as a journalist, told Chris: “The problem with modern life is we'll get into our trenches, we will have our fields of expertise and social media drives us as well. We will become very, very good at one very, very small thing. And what was interesting in history - people like da Vinci being the prime example - is people saw across these trenches. And even in the 19th Century, poets also were interested in science, and scientists were also interested in the arts. So you had people like Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin and he won the Nobel Prize. He was also an artist.” Imagination is our most powerful muscle and our greatest source of fulfilment. Find out how to exercise yours with two of the country’s most influential and creative people.

If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. His interlocutor Will Gompertz was a Director of the Tate Galleries and is now the Artistic Director of the Barbican. A household name from his time as the BBC’s first ever Arts Editor, he’s the internationally bestselling author of books distilling his insights from a lifetime of working with and learning from the world’s most creative people. Albert oversees titles and businesses including British Vogue, GQ, Vanity Fair, and Tatler. In The Imagination Muscle, he shows how the imagination is not merely reserved for artists and creatives, but is a muscle to be trained and developed. He told Chris: “I work in the business of ideas. Conde Nast is a company that thrives on ideas. And we got to keep ideas coming… If you're selling bananas, you want to know where the bananas come from, and so, with us, we need to know where the ideas are coming from.Like an L.A. story that haunted me for a few years. A man shot his wife, drove to a freeway overpass, got out of his car and shot himself. He fell 100 feet onto the freeway below. His body smashed into a car, killing the driver, a woman. Beautiful, moving, profoundly imaginative in itself – this book is as entertaining as it is relevant and practical’ ALAIN DE BOTTON So you had this mixture of ideas. And really, I think the lesson from this and from Picasso, is draw your sources from all sorts of different places and bring them together and read what no-one else is reading. Because that will make your mind an original mind, a fresh mind, and it'll keep you stimulated and keep you happy, and keep you alive.”

You pass a billboard of a happy family—smiling dad and mom, two laughing kids—at a theme park. Happy to most people, maybe. But: Managing director of Condé Nast Britain, Albert Read joined the Chris Evans Breakfast Show with cinch to talk about his new book, The Imagination Muscle. The Imagination Muscle: Where Good Ideas Come From (And How To Have More Of Them) is out tomorrow (23rd March).Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial?