Many of us are constantly in need of …

Creativity can bring a lot of joy into our lives — if we let it. As we get older, unfortunately, many of us leave our favorite activities behind, forget to play and instead go through the motions. Wake up. Go to work. Run errands. Come home. Have dinner. Watch T.V. Go to bed. Rinse. Repeat.

In The Book of Doing: Everyday Activities to Unlock Your Creativity and Joy, Allison Arden, publisher of Advertising Age, shares a slew of fun and playful ideas to reignite our creativity. More than that, her book shows us how to create and find joy in our everyday lives.

So what is “doing”? According to Arden, it’s anything and everything from creating, making, helping, experimenting, drawing, reading, playing, acting, cooking, tasting, celebrating and loving.

Here are 10 of my favorite ideas from her book. I hope you’ll try them!

Courage is plentiful. In fact, it’s all around us, writes Robert Biswas-Diener, Ph.D, a positive psychology researcher and founder of Positive Acorn, in his latest book The Courage Quotient: How Science Can Make You Braver.

And it doesn’t just happen on the battlefield: It also happens in the boardroom, on a bike ride and at the grocery store, he says. Courage lives in the everyday and helps us lead more fulfilling lives.

According to Biswas-Diener, courage “allows you to pursue the life you want, to overcome obstacles that hold you back from living a full life, and to put your core values into action, and it also helps and elevates others along the way.” It also helps you have better relationships and do better at work, he says.

In his book Biswas-Diener defines courage as “the willingness to act toward a moral or worthwhile goal despite the presence of risk, uncertainty and fear.”

The other week, I was struggling with a very unstable computer (yes, this is apparently a technical term).

It seems to be behaving itself now, and I am so happy! I take my word-processer, my email, and my internet access for granted, but when they aren’t available as easily as usual, I realize how much these tools add to my happiness and how much they contribute to my ability to work easily and smoothly.

One of the unhappy truths about human nature is that it’s hard for us to appreciate what we have, until we lose it. When we lose something like electricity or running water, or worse, our health, then it’s clear how mightily such things contribute to happiness and comfort.

I love a good manifesto. I love Bob Sutton’s manifesto about work, and Madame X’s manifesto about money, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s manifesto for his apprentices.

Somehow, I’d never come across Google’s Ten things we know to be true manifesto, and I found it very interesting.

The Google site explains, “We first wrote these 10 things when Google was just a few years old. From time to time we revisit this list to see if it still holds true. We hope it does — and you can hold us to that.”

Self-care doesn’t require hours of free time. In fact, just 10 minutes or less can help to boost your well-being. Below, experts share their tips for lifting your mood, minimizing anxiety and even enhancing your relationships.

1. “Act your shoe size, not your age.”

This according to Deborah Serani, PsyD, psychologist and author of Living with Depression.
In other words, play for the sake of playing. “Find your funny bone, lose yourself in imaginative moments [or] get your air-guitar on — whatever it is, have some unstructured, unfettered fun,” she said.

Psychologist Elisha Goldstein also recently talked about the importance of play in this blog post and offered valuable tips on practicing play.

In books, movies, plays, television, my favorite scenes are often moments of transcendence — when, in the muddle of existence, characters somehow manage to break through everything to engage with each other, and with higher values.

Just off the top of my head, I can think of moments like this from Gilead, The Wire, Friends, Steel Magnolias, the play Bug which has haunted me for years…such moments are the principal subject of Flannery O’Connor.

I also look for them in real life.

For instance, a few weeks ago, I was talking to a bunch of first-year medical students about happiness — mostly, I was pestering them to get enough sleep. At one point, an older doctor jumped into the conversation. “Remember,” he said to them earnestly, “you’re going to be doctors. That work is really going to bring you a lot of happiness.”

Curious about creativity and how others innovate? “How I Create” is our monthly interview series, which strives to inspire by giving you a glimpse into other people’s creative processes.

We’ve already interviewed everyone from career coaches to authors to photographers.

This month, we’re talking with Tiffany Moore, a life and business coach and co-founder of Teahouse Studio, a workshop space in Berkeley, CA.

(You might remember Moore from her great advice in this creativity piece.)

Through her coaching and writing, Moore helps people transform their lives and find the magic within to live their most sparkly lives!

I’m a big fan of John Tierney’s science column, Findings, in the New York Times. And I’m even a bigger fan of his new book, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. This book, co-written with Roy Baumeister, who is one of the most prominent researchers of self-control, is fascinating. For anyone who wants to be happier, self-command and self-knowledge are crucial areas of study.

As a long-time reader of John’s work, I knew that he and I are interested in many of the same subjects, so I was curious to hear what he had to say on the subject of happiness.

Gretchen: What’s a simple activity that consistently makes you happier?

John: Exercising, which I do by commuting by bike from Brooklyn to Manhattan. Crossing the East River is especially joyful, but just getting outside and moving is enough to raise my spirits.

Stealing is not a crime — at least when you’re stealing ideas from a variety of artists. That’s the basis of Austin Kleon’s book Steal Like An Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative. (A premise that he, of course, stole from other artists.)

In the book, Kleon shares unique insights on cultivating creativity.

Specifically, he presents the below 10 tips, which he created for a talk at a community college. They represent the things he wished he would’ve known when starting out.

Thought = creation. If these thoughts are …