Creative Blogging for Personal or Business Improvement
"How You Do Dat?"
One might pick up Creative Blogging in order to learn about ways to tweak one’s blog and make it more interesting or up to date but despite the title this book is really an exposition of the author’s personal and business philosophies. There is a section devoted to using blogs to foster creative thinking for business groups but this is less a how-to book on the blogging process than an analysis of how Johnson has tuned in to the collective consciousness and his own intuitive powers to create positive outcomes in his private and public pursuits.
Despite this somewhat misleading beginning the writing is clear and peppered with many nuggets of good advice. Creative Blogging is not a book easily absorbed in one sitting as it invites rumination about the dense and thoughtful ideas Johnson puts forth. He has many recommendations about how to achieve greater happiness and success in job hunting business expansion playing the stock market and personal goals all distilled from many years of experience. Like other distillations these bits need time to be fully savored and therefore this slim volume is best read in chunks.
Johnson’s writing style is straightforward though a bit dry rather like reading a series of grandfatherly letters of advice or a pile of business memos. He does pepper the mix with quotations from Margaret Mead Bill Clinton George Bernard Shaw and his personal favorite Albert Einstein which liven up the prose.
Any book with the word “creative” in the title should attempt to attract potential readers with a snazzy cover but there is nothing about the barren highway signpost cover photo that beckons. Johnson should have heeded his own words and done a blog poll with other cover options to package this otherwise interesting book with a little more pizzazz.
Creative Blogging would be most useful for readers looking for self-improvement techniques when they are in a business or personal rut. It provides many examples of ways to engage “out of the box” thinking and problem solving and Johnson’s “death cross” tactic of picking stocks will appeal to finance mavens. While the author could have selected a clearer title business owners looking to shake out creative ways of thinking from themselves and their employees will find this book helpful.
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
