The Imagination Muscle

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But the story did not go away. Not for me. Because Jacqueline Dwyer was the woman I was going to marry. Imagination is our most powerful muscle and our greatest source of fulfilment. Find out how to exercise yours with two of the country’s most influential and creative people. His interlocutor Will Gompertz was a Director of the Tate Galleries and is now the Artistic Director of the Barbican. A household name from his time as the BBC’s first ever Arts Editor, he’s the internationally bestselling author of books distilling his insights from a lifetime of working with and learning from the world’s most creative people.

Spanning pre-historic times through to the twenty-first century, The Imagination Muscle explores the genesis of ideas - from Thomas Edison's serial embracing of failure to Jane Jacobs' vision of how we should build cities together; from Steve Jobs' approach to office design to the Japanese concept of Ma . Touching on art, music, film, literature, science and entrepreneurship, this book examines how the imagination has evolved - in shape, power and pace - through the millennia.What if it is really a man in disguise and he’s on the down low because a contract has been put out on him? So you had this mixture of ideas. And really, I think the lesson from this and from Picasso, is draw your sources from all sorts of different places and bring them together and read what no-one else is reading. Because that will make your mind an original mind, a fresh mind, and it'll keep you stimulated and keep you happy, and keep you alive.” Beautiful, moving, profoundly imaginative in itself – this book is as entertaining as it is relevant and practical.’ – Alain de Botton

Albert, who began his career as a journalist, told Chris: “The problem with modern life is we'll get into our trenches, we will have our fields of expertise and social media drives us as well. We will become very, very good at one very, very small thing. And what was interesting in history - people like da Vinci being the prime example - is people saw across these trenches. And even in the 19th Century, poets also were interested in science, and scientists were also interested in the arts. So you had people like Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin and he won the Nobel Prize. He was also an artist.”Speaking more about Leonardo da Vinci, he said: “While he was painting the Mona Lisa, he would paint it during the day. And then at night, he would go to this mortuary in Florence, and he dissected cadavers. And he would study very, very closely, the way a smile works and the way that the curve of a nostril is delineated. So he took his scientific learnings and really took art to the next level by really understanding the muscular makeup of the face.” Touching on art, music, film, literature, science and entrepreneurship, Albert joins How To Academy to examine how the imagination has evolved through the millennia, and how you can nurture and cultivate your own creativity. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here.