Shane Life

52 Projects: Random Acts of Everyday Creativity
by Jeffrey Yamaguchi
Rating: 8 out of 10

As a part of our reading project, Alli and I agreed to pick a book for each other. 52 Projects was Alli’s pick for me.

Yamaguchi started the web site 52projects.com as an outlet for all his ideas for projects that he kept himself busy with over the course of several years. To him, a “project” is something that keeps him busy, that keeps him sane.

I enjoyed reading the book a lot. In fact, I breezed through it in one quick sitting. One quick Southwest-exit-row-middle-seat-on-the-way-to-San-Francisco-sitting. And it didn’t even take me the whole flight. It’s a cool book. Yamaguchi spends the first half of it explaining what projects mean to him, why he does projects, etc. The second half of the book consists of all the projects, as well as variations of the projects that he has heard of or thought of.

For fueling creativity, it’s a great book. There’s were some projects in the book that didn’t interest me at all, but there were a lot that did, too. The projects range from writing to photography to crafts and letter-writing. I leaned more toward the photography projects, but I also liked a lot of the writing projects as well. One of my favorites:

Buy a 12-pack of the crappy beer that you used to drink in college and send one to each one of your college drinking buddies with a note that tells them a date and time that they must shotgun the beer all at the same time.

It just made me think my best friends and how much they’d love that (although since almost all of them live in the KC area, we could just do it on a Saturday night).

This is definitely a book I’ll come back to…it could be very inspiring and useful for spurring creativity down the line when I find myself in a funk.

One of my favorite things about this book, though, was that Alli had read the book before me and had taken notes in the margins and highlighted stuff for me that she thought I would like or projects that she thought she or I or we might do. That made it a really personal reading experience for me and that was my favorite part of it.