What's on My Bookshelf
- Hellish Helena
- May 1
- 2 min read
My bookshelf has been slowly shifting. There’s been a wave of more “product thinking” titles creeping in, like Empowered, Testing Business Ideas, or Design - Think - Make - Break - Repeat (links at the bottom). Books that push you to validate faster, think in systems, and zoom out from pixels to outcomes. It reflects where design naturally grows when you’ve been in the field for a while.
But among all of these, one book stood out in a very different way: Creative Confidence by Kelley brothers from the design agency IDEO.
It’s not trying to teach you frameworks or optimize your product decisions. It’s lighter. More human. The kind of book you pick up over the weekend and don’t feel pressured to “extract value” from every page. And yet, it gives you something just as important. It reminds you why you started creating in the first place.
As designers, we spend so much time justifying our work, through metrics, business impact, stakeholder alignment. Which is all important. But somewhere along the way, it’s easy to forget that creativity itself is a skill worth nurturing, not just a tool to deliver outcomes.
Creative Confidence brings that back. It doesn’t overwhelm you. It makes you feel a bit lighter about your work... and a bit more open to trying things without overthinking them. If most of your current reading is about building better products, this one is a nice counterbalance. It is a collection of stories, exercises, and examples designed to help people reconnect with their creative potential. David and Tom Kelley argue that creativity isn’t a rare talent reserved for artists or designers, but something everyone can develop through practice.
The book explores topics such as overcoming the fear of failure, building confidence through small experiments, embracing a growth mindset, and using design thinking to tackle everyday challenges. Rather than offering strict methodologies, it shares real-world stories of people who learned to trust their ideas, take creative risks, and turn uncertainty into opportunity. The overall message is simple but powerful: creativity grows when you stop waiting for permission and start making things.
So to wrap up: Less pressure. More curiosity. And sometimes, that’s exactly what you need to move forward.
Books mentioned:
Creative Confidence https://www.ideo.com/journal/creative-confidence
Testing Business Ideas https://www.strategyzer.com/library/testing-business-ideas-book
Design - Think - Make - Break - Repeat https://designthinkmakebreakrepeat.com/
