Flowchart Your Way to Happiness

From ever-inventive designer Stefan G. Bucher of You Deserve a Medal and Daily Monster fame comes 344 Questions: The Creative Person's Do-It-Yourself Guide to Insight, Survival, and Artistic Fulfillment -- a delightful pocket-sized compendium of flowcharts and lists illustrated in Bucher's unmistakable style to help you figure out life's big answers, in the vein of today's inadvertent running theme of self-help-books-that-aren't-really-"self-help"-books.

Besides Bucher's own questions, the tiny but potent handbook features contributions from 36 beloved cross-disciplinary creators, including Brain Pickings favorites Christoph Niemann, Stefan Sagmeister, Marian Bantjes, Doyald Young, and Jakob Trollbäck.

Let's be clear: I want this book to be useful to you. There are many great how-to books and biographies out there, and even more gorgeous collections of current and classic work to awe and inspire. But looking at catalogs of artistic success won't make you a better artist any more than looking at photos of healthy people will cure your cold. You've got to take action! --Stefan G. Bucher

(Sure, this may be somewhat remiss in overlooking the basic mechanism of combinatorial creativity, but it's it's hard to argue with the need to make ideas happen rather than just contemplating them.)

Though Bucher designed the book as a sequence, it also works choose-you-own-adventure-style and, as Bucher is quick to encourage, asks for hands-on interaction -- dog-earing, marginalia, doodles. "If you keep this book in mint condition, I've failed," he says.

We are all different people, but we face a lot of the same questions. The point of this book is to give you lots of questions you can use to look at your life -- in a new way, with a different perspective, or maybe just in more detail than you have before -- so you can find out how you work, what you want to do, and how you can get it done in a way that works for you. Specifically. --Stefan G. Bucher

Thoughtfully conceived and charmingly executed, wonderfully playful yet infinitely useful, 344 Questions is the kind of treat in which anyone with a beating heart and firing neurons would find delight -- and, more likely than not, find some big answers, too.

Images: Pearson Education, Inc./New Riders Press.

This post also appears on Brain Pickings.