Do you consider yourself a creative person? However you answer, it's likely that you underestimate your creative potential. Most people do. Perhaps that's why Oliver Wendell Holmes spoke about wasted human talent and lamented that too many people "die with their music still in them."

Everyday Genius: Principles of Creativity and Innovation for Life is a guide to help you do creative work, the type that produces important personal and societal benefits as you share the literal and figurative music inside you with others. Everyday Genius takes readers on an inspiring journey across the rich, historical landscape of human creativity and innovation, with practical examples and powerful ideas from art, literature, music, science, industry, and other fields that demonstrate the nature, origins, and purposes of creativity and the impact of creative work on ourselves and others, and teaches how each one of us can carve out and cultivate our own space in the terrain of human achievement as an everyday genius-a phrase that alludes to every person's inherent ability to do meaningful creative work. Think about finding better work-life balance, engaging in leisure activities that have restorative benefits, the talents you can develop, and the problems you will solve when you understand how to become the everyday genius you were born to be.