by Casi Yost | Featured Contributor
I first heard about these two books over podcasts. Are you surprised? By now you shouldn’t be.
The first is the “Artists Way” by Julia Cameron
This book is what allowed me to creatively break through to get to the mindset where I needed to be to actually take myself and my business seriously.
The premise of this book is that it helps you to unlock your creativity. Lets be real honest here – as soon as we get into high school and then move into college, the creativity is beat right out of us. The real world doesn’t like when we don’t conform, so our creative thinking goes right out the window.
OR we’re too distracted by trying to make money, party, look good on social media, etc., to actually take time to be creative. Because well, that is a “waste of time,” when you could be doing something to make you money. Right?
So wrong.
Some of the top athletes, CEO’s and most successful people in their fields take time to just sit and think.
Don’t believe me? Ryan Holiday does this, major companies and Silicon Valley have what are called “think tanks,” where they creatively come up with solutions to problems or create ideas for things to make money.
You can’t expect to grow your business if you don’t designate time to dream big and come up with new ideas.
And no, the five minutes in the shower don’t count. You need large amounts of dedicated time DAILY to do this. I do this three times a day.
WHAT? But you’re busy! You work and have two jobs!
I know. I fit it in. Right in the morning, when I drive to work and when I drive home. Those are my 2.5 hours a day to think.
You don’t have to have this much time, but because I live so far away from my work, I have this “luxury.”
So how did the “Artists Way” help me in the first place?
Morning Pages. Total breakthrough machine.
How it works is that you write and don’t stop until you have filled three pages each morning. Yes in the morning.
This allows you to brain dump anything that is blocking you from thinking clearly, get your ideas out so they aren’t bouncing around and blocking you once again. It allows you to work through feelings, ideas, whatever.
It helped me because I have ideas and don’t know how to execute them. I need to talk them through and writing them out allows me to look at my idea from point a to point z because its on paper!
There are so many advantages from doing just the morning pages, but there are other excersize’s people can do.
Don’t take my word for it. When you research top performers like Tim Ferris, you notice there is a trend where the most successful people in their industries do something similar to this.
Now, the other book is totally in another area: Philosophy.
Don’t zone out on me here. I totally thought the same thing too.
“Ugh, really? Do I have to?”
Yes. It is digestible. My favorite author of all time as you know by now is Ryan Holiday. He has written so many good books that honestly helped me re-frame my mindset, but I’ll talk about that in another post.
This book, “The Daily Stoic” has one piece of wisdom for you each day and it seriously sets the tone for how I think about problems.
The way I use the information from the book is this:
- If I approach my problems from a different perspective and different angle, maybe I will have a better outlook, suffer less, and use my problems as a stepping stone or opportunity.
This book allows you to re-frame the way you think so that you can approach problems and life in a way that sets you up for success. Totally amazing right?
This is the one thing I keep telling people: you need to change your mindset about how you approach your business.
Why? If you do the same thing over and over with the same results, why don’t you do it a different way? Maybe you’d get what you wanted: success.
So… this book and other books I talk about (Gary Vaynerchuck and Crushing It) totally do that.
If you want to grow your business, you have to invest in yourself and your business intelligence. You want to know your stuff right? Well start learning, and don’t stop.
I wrote a “short” overview of all the things I’ve done to grow my business HERE in case you’re interested in looking at that too!
Have any books you think I should read? Drop them below:
Thanks for reading friends!
XO,
Casi
Casi Yost, Wedding Photographer and Community over Competition advocate.
Casi is a wedding photographer and educator based out of Oregon. When she isn’t dancing it up with coupes at weddings, she hosts workshops for women wanting to start their own photography business. She is a passionate about community over competition and how it can heal broken businesses.
Find Casi on her websites casiyost.com and beyondworkshop.net or Instagram.
