How do creative people work? How do they manage to structure their day so that the daily routine becomes part of the creative process? When there's not enough time to get things done, should you sacrifice everything—sleep, a decent income, a clean home—or can you develop the ability to focus your efforts, work less and do better? To answer these questions, Mason Curry studied the lives and daily routines of 161 outstanding people past and present. The heroes of his research are famous writers, composers, artists, choreographers, playwrights, philosophers, cartoonists, comedians, poets, sculptors. Beethoven and Kafka, George Sand and Picasso, Woody Allen and Agatha Christie, Leo Tolstoy and Charles Dickens, John Updike and Haruki Murakami... The reader learns about how celebrities combined everyday life and creativity, what schedule they followed, how they fought their fears and fatigue and doubts about how they ate, slept, communicated, walked - in a word, about all those “cunning rituals” that helped them become great.