Creative You - Book Review

Time for another book review! 

Creative You by David B. Goldstein & Otto Kroeger

This post does contain affiliate links.

Joellen here :) Now, I have been told for much of my life that I am creative, so a bunch of what is in this book I totally agreed with and was able to just read it and breeze right along. If you wish you were creative and feel like you have no idea what that would look like for you, I recommend this book EVEN MORE!

You might already know, I can be a little obsessive when it comes to figuring out personality types. I discovered this book while I was reading another book about personality called Reading People by Anne Bogel. Ha! Being already into so many creative endeavors, I felt like this book would help me gain some more clarity regarding my strengths, weaknesses, and struggles. And boy, was I right!

Creative You is a book about how your personality affects your work and your pursuits. But the authors don't just talk about specifically artistic careers. Being creative can happen in the most standard, cookie-cutter type of jobs. We all need to think creatively to organize our time and tasks. Engineers have to be creative when navigating a new project or dealing with a group of employees. Moms have to be creative with their use of time, their meal-planning, and scheduling tasks that affect the rest of the household. The book has far better examples than I can give off the top of my head right now, but every job has areas where creativity is required in order to perform well. And learning how to harness the natural creativity that comes naturally to you and your personality type will help you make the most of it.

This book looks like an intimidating read based on its size, but there are actually lots of parts you can skip (and the authors even tell you that!). There are some descriptions about the Meyers-Briggs personality assessment, plus descriptions of the different personality types as well as each of the 8 labels that are used to create the personality type you get "assigned." It was all super fascinating!

I read most of the general information about the different personalities, but when things got specific I skimmed quite a bit and focused on my own (ENFJ). Actually, reading through the descriptions really confirmed my type and when it came to the actual work-related stuff, my jaw was on the floor!

The book goes through many types of creative endeavors and then lists out how personality shapes how we work within those realms, like with cooking, gardening, writing, sculpting or painting. I found this section truly enlightening! It helped reveal to me what kinds of artwork I like to paint and how, and what type of writing I enjoy and don't. It confirmed my suspicions that I like to paint from a picture or scene, rather than from my own imagination. It also told me that I like to paint more abstract instead of realistically (which I only recently had discovered). The book also confirmed in my mind that I will likely never write a factual, detailed, historical account of anything without a partner doing most of the nitty-gritty research work, which I was extremely relieved about. Not that I am planning to write anything like that anytime soon.

Even if your job or career or personal endeavors don't appear creative on the outside, this book will be really helpful to see how using the strengths of your personality have creative uses within any job and within all your relationships.

If you are into personality at all and want to get some really practical input regarding how to leverage it in your work or life, this book is for you! As far as business and productivity types of books, I would put it right up next to The Accidental Creative.

I really can't think of anything I didn't like about this book. It fed all of my loves: personality, creativity, productivity, personal growth, and more. Grab a copy and let me know what you think!

A Subtle Glow.

The Radium Girls by Kate Moore - A medically disturbing story worth ALL of your attention. *This post does contain affiliate links.

I owe my friend Chelsi a great deal. After all, she introduced me to my husband! Over the last 17 years that I've been friends with her, she has also recommended some pretty stellar books. A while back, she said she was listening to a fascinating story about a group of women who were hired to paint dials for watches and airplanes with paint containing radium. Chelsi was pretty brief, explaining that these women didn't know why their teeth were falling out or why they were getting sick, but that was pretty much all I knew.

Fast-forward to this Fall, I saw that a friend's daughter was involved in a play about these Radium Girls. I decided to finally go and pick up the book and quickly became obsessed! The story really is fascinating, but maybe not in the way you would suspect.

This book is longer - 400+ pages. It's got a lot of medical and scientific information, but you don't have to understand most of it to follow the story. And if you have trouble keeping people straight, that's really okay too - you'll still be able to follow fairly well. If you have trouble reading about pus, teeth falling out, bones protruding from skin, or hemorrhaging, you might want to pass on this book. While those things do come up often, they aren't the crux of the book, so I suggest you at least take a look if you think you can handle it or skim over some of it without trouble.

In all honesty, I don't think the writing itself is spectacularly engaging, but the story really is! These women were told lie after lie after lie. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. But with all the debates about medical laws, forced vaccination, and the recalling of so many "safe" drugs lately, this story is super important to understand.

Here's the gist of it.

This book follows the lives of a few groups of women, all of whom worked in a dial-painting factory at some point. They are in a couple specific places and work for various amounts of time. As more and more of them become ill, they band together to try and fight for the help they need in their expenses and facilitating better safety regulations for industrial workers. They also end up working toward making sure that medical information is available and not hidden, no matter what terrible results that research reveals.

These women were courageous. I cannot imagine enduring the suffering that so many of them had no choice but to live under, especially without access to the medical information we now have. When I put myself in their shoes, I wonder how I would have reacted to being diagnosed, poked and prodded, and led astray the way they were. Many of these women died without ever knowing the truth about how or why they got sick, and my heart aches for them and their families.

Over the course of the book, they are involved in several litigations; some successful and some not. In the end, it's shocking what these companies get away with or at least try to get away with. And it's appalling how long this information was hidden. You'll also get to hear about the long-term affects that radium had on the community, which is crazy, fascinating, and scary.

Overall, I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in medicine, disease, or the legalities surrounding worker's compensation and the discoveries of harmful chemicals/elements. You will definitely be shocked by what people said was safe! Despite the writing not being flowery or fancy, the story was truly compelling and I had trouble putting the book down - I just needed to know what would happen.

I haven't read any other books like this (though I have had a couple more recommended to me), so I can't really compare it to anything very fairly. Maybe you can tell me! Have you read The Radium Girls? Does it remind you of other books you have read?

If you like The Radium Girls, Chelsi also recommends The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and Pandemic: Tracking Contagions from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond. My mom and older sister have read that first one and have the same type of comments about the fascinating and scary vibe of the book. Give them a shot and tell me what you think!

Come visit here again next week as we dive into some "Get to Know You" posts. We hope this review helps guide your decisions of what to read and helps you glean the most you can from you time spent in your books!