This short booklet urges readers to tap into their creative potential to improve their lives. Osborn says the ability to generate ideas gives one the power to lead a successful career, have healthy relationships, to have fun and ultimately get more out of life. 

How to “Think Up” is one of the earliest books published on deliberate creative thinking. Osborn was truly ahead of his time, preceding the era of creativity research by nearly ten years.

“Who can think up ideas? You and every other normally intelligent person. But you have to try.”

“Everybody loves to be a critic or a judge. Judicial judgment calls for no great mental sweat.”

Your Creative Power presents methods for deliberate creativity that are strikingly similar to those being presented in today’s literature on innovation and creativity. The most notable of these methods is Brainstorming, which, evidently, has become universal.

Brainstorming: “using the brain to storm a creative problem—and doing so in commando fashion, with each stormer attacking the same objective.”

Osborn reportedly lost 20 pounds while writing Wake Up Your Mind (1952).

Applied Imagination, published in 1953, is Osborn’s best-known work. Creativity courses in universities, organizations, and even the armed forces used Applied Imagination as a textbook. Osborn introduces the Creative Problem Solving Process, a creativity model still widely used by creativity scholars and practitioners today.