Finding Your Creative DNA

This book enables readers to discover their inner creative DNA, by providing a strong dose of the four elements of the Creative Matrix-Interrogation, Information, Interpretation, and Inspiration. Creative Aerobics (CA) generates a personal ideation system that produces creativity on demand (COD) and that arrives at multiple solutions in less than an hour in a relaxing and enjoyable way.

The strength of the volume lies in its ability to move readers past the conventional and time-consuming 20th-century ideation. It helps develop an individual, personal approach to their creative DNA by introducing increasingly complex word exercises that strengthen left-brain problem-solving and increase right-brain discoveries. It teaches, encourages, and integrates all aspects of CA to develop the mental muscle that fuels readers’ paths to creative accomplishment. By taking CA step by step, readers develop a comfort level, knowing they will always be able to come up with ideas.

This book will be useful to students, young professionals, and senior leaders looking for the inside track to their creativity. It will also be an invaluable daily practice and interesting read for all students taking general education courses, especially those opting for integrative learning courses which are becoming more prevalent across universities worldwide.

Linda Conway Correll George, upon graduation from Mt. Holyoke college, set out for New York City, where she hoped her dream of writing music for Broadway shows would become a reality. Instead, her first musical success was the jingle she wrote to introduce Beech-Nut Fruit Stripe Gum on her day job at Young & Rubicam Advertising. Ten years and several tier 1 New York agencies later, she swapped the excitement of the Big Apple for her weekend home, a farm in rural Massachusetts, where she expanded her writing experience, creating innovative radio commercials (one, a Clio Award winner) for a local FM station. But Linda missed her former professional life. She relocated to Houston, Texas, as a copywriter at a national agency, followed by promotion to Associate Creative Director. After 7 years in the Lone Star state, she returned to her native Rhode Island as a VP/ Creative Director. She transitioned into academe, teaching advertising courses at Northeastern University in Boston and developing the forerunners of Creative Aerobics at the Rhode Island School of Design. Professorships followed in southeast Missouri; at the flagship University of Florida; in southern Illinois; and summers in Ahmedabad, India at MICA. During this period, Linda and her students won local, regional, national, and international advertising awards. Linda retired from teaching but continues to accept freelance writing assignments, international awards (three in 2022) for them, and commissions for her serious and sacred music compositions. Currently, she lives in Tennessee with her Orlando feline rescue Endora, who’s learning to like country-western music. And her husband, who already does!

Arpan Yagnik is an associate professor of advertising at Penn State University. He specializes in the areas of creativity, fear, intergenerational harmony, and radioactive flourishing. He is a globally renowned speaker, trainer, and scholar who has conducted approximately 200 workshops and seminars in four continents training thousands of professionals and leaders.