“This is a book about ideas. Your ideas. Where they come from. Why you get them, and how to radically increase your chances of manifesting them…. But even more importantly, it’s a book about the creative act – that mysterious process out of which new ideas make their appearance in the world.”
With this enticement, Mitchell Lewis Ditkoff invites us into his how-to book Awake at the Wheel – Getting your Great Ideas Rolling (In an Uphill World). From a philosophical stance that tends to favor eastern thought, Ditkoff develops his thesis — you can make your ideas reality — in three parts.
He sets out by telling “The Story of Og,” a Neanderthal who first had the idea of the wheel. In “What Og Learned,” he analyzes Og’s experience and talks about the twelve best practices of creative people. Finally, in “Tooling Up” under the five categories — Attend, Intend, Suspend, Extend and Connect — he lists 35 creativity tips and suggests several practical wha-to-do points for each.
Ditkoff’s writing style is easy to understand and often entertaining. It is loaded with clever ideas and word play (“I have worked with left-brained people, right-brained people and air-brained people.”) and chapter titles like “The Big Meating” and “Wheely Best Practices.” His sentences are often short and, in some places so simple and yet profound, the text reads like a collection of proverbs.
The black print on cream-colored stock is easy on the eyes. Each main section is introduced with a title page that has a reproduction of a cartoon figure of Og from the cover of the book. These, plus cartoon drawings of a primitive wheel used in the Og story, give the book a light-hearted feel. In addition, the Og story part has wide left and right margins, which contain italicized quotes by famous people. A variety of fonts, good use of space, and bold and italics make the progression of ideas easy to follow and the pages visually interesting.
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