How to be creative

Every once in a while, you'll download something from the web and sometimes you'll just get plain lucky. I mean really lucky! I downloaded Hugh MacLeod's book (manifesto) How to Be Creative from the ChangeThis site and it just blew me away.

If you've ever thought about doing something creative with your life or in your job, this is a book that I'd recommend you read. He writes simply, lucidly, and best of all as if he's talking to you. Most difficult to do that I can assure you. The cartoons on business cards (what a brilliant idea!) throughout the book are also superb.

If you like the cartoons and his writing, check out his site at Gaping Void.

ChangeThis

If you're interested in reading what some famous people (Tom Peters, Joel Spolsky, Jay Conrad Levinson, Seth Godin) have to say about marketing, running companies, creativity, and other stuff, then ChangeThis is a site for you.

Here's what ChangeThis says about themselves:

ChangeThis is creating a new kind of media. A form of media that uses existing tools (like PDFs, blogs and the web) to challenge the way ideas are created and spread. We're on a mission to spread important ideas and change minds

You can download what they call manifestos (PDF format) from their site for free. I found Guerilla Marketing by Jay Conrad Levinson (author of the best selling marketing book Guerilla Marketing) and some other good stuff as well.

Opera! The browser from Norway

Been a while since I last posted. It just struck me as odd that I use a browser all day and I've not mentioned it on my blog yet.

I've been using the Opera browser since the version that crashed a lot (I think it was 5.0 or something) and I'm using 7.51 now (yeah, too lazy to upgrade) and I love it.

I love the lightweight browser, that Google is so easy to access, that I can load web pages faster by choosing not to display images, that it allows me tabbed browsing (yes, I know other browsers do too) and that it loads pages faster than other browsers I've used (empirical data based on my experience only). In short, I love it.

The only thing that stinks (and this is not Opera's fault) is that some sites won't load properly on Opera. Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, Google Mail are a couple of the more famous ones. I'm using Avant Browser to type this blog and it runs on top of IE. If you like IE, chances are you'll love this one. I've tried Mozilla once but somehow it didn't convince me to switch. I guess I'm just used to Opera.

Yes, I run Opera's ad version and I run it asking it to identify itself as IE 6.0 but who cares? It serves me well and I like it the best. Try it out, you might like it too. I even convinced an Internet cafe owner to load Opera on all his machines by just mentioning it to him. Honest!