How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention, and Discovery
von Kevin Ashton
In one experiment, Dutch psychologist Eric Rietzschel asked people to score ideas based on how “feasible,” “original,” and “creative” they were, and then asked them which ones were “the best.”51 The ideas people selected as “the best” ideas were almost always the ones they had scored as the least “creative.” When Rietzschel asked people to assess their own work, he got the same result: almost everybody thought their least “creative” ideas were their “best” ideas.52 The findings are highly repeatable. Decades of data all show the same thing: even though we say we want creation, we tend to reject it. In Einstein’s own words: “I was led to it by steps.”34 All stories of aha! moments—and there are surprisingly few—are like these: anecdotal, often apocryphal, and unable to survive scrutiny. And there has been a lot of scrutiny: in the last few decades of the twentieth century, many psychologists believed that creation comes from a period of unconscious thinking they called “incubation,” followed by an emotion they called “the feeling of knowing,” followed by an aha! moment, or “insight.”
There is a myth about how something new comes to be. Geniuses have dramatic moments of insight where great things and thoughts are born whole. Poems are written in dreams. Symphonies are composed complete. Science is accomplished with eureka shrieks. Businesses are built by magic touch. Something is not, then is. We do not see the road from nothing to new, and maybe we do not want to.
What makes our species different and dominant is innovation. What is special about us is not the size of our brains, speech, or the mere fact that we use tools. It is that each of us is in our own way driven to make things better. We occupy the evolutionary niche of new. The niche of new is not the property of a privileged few. It is what makes humans human.
The conclusion: “Group brainstorming, over a wide range of group sizes, inhibits rather than facilitates creative thinking.” The groups produced fewer and worse results because they were more likely to get fixated on one idea and because, despite all exhortations to the contrary, some members felt inhibited and refrained from full participation.
Most researchers now regard incubation as folk psychology—a popular belief but wrong.40 Almost all of the evidence suggests the same thing: Caterpillars do not cocoon in the unconscious mind. The butterflies of creation come from conscious thinking.
Great creators know that the best step forward is often a step back—to scrutinize, analyze, and assess, to find faults and flaws, to challenge and to change. You cannot escape a maze if you only move forward. Sometimes the path ahead is behind.
"In one experiment, Dutch psychologist Eric Rietzschel asked people to score ideas based on how “feasible,” “original,” and “creative” they were, and then asked them which ones were “the best.”51 The ideas people selected as “the best” ideas were almost always the ones they had scored as the least “creative.” When Rietzschel asked people to assess their own work, he got the same result: almost everybody thought their least “creative” ideas were their “best” ideas.52 The findings are highly repeatable. Decades of data all show the same thing: even though we say we want creation, we tend to reject it."
"In Einstein’s own words: “I was led to it by steps.”34 All stories of aha! moments—and there are surprisingly few—are like these: anecdotal, often apocryphal, and unable to survive scrutiny. And there has been a lot of scrutiny: in the last few decades of the twentieth century, many psychologists believed that creation comes from a period of unconscious thinking they called “incubation,” followed by an emotion they called “the feeling of knowing,” followed by an aha! moment, or “insight.”"
"Research into brainstorming has a clear conclusion. The best way to create is to work alone and evaluate solutions as they occur. The worst way to create is to work in large groups and defer criticism. Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs’s cofounder at Apple and the inventor of its first computer, offers the same advice: “Work alone.58 You’re going to be best able to design revolutionary products and features if you’re working on your own. Not on a committee. Not on a team.”"
"Work is the soul of creation. Work is getting up early and going home late, turning down dates and giving up weekends, writing and rewriting, reviewing and revising, rote and routine, staring down the doubt of the blank page, beginning when we do not know where to start, and not stopping when we cannot go on. It is not fun, romantic, or, most of the time, even interesting. If we want to create, we must, in the words of Paul Gallico, open our veins and bleed.28"
"Creating is taking steps, not making leaps: find a problem, solve it, and repeat. Most steps wins. The best artists, scientists, engineers, inventors, entrepreneurs, and other creators are the ones who keep taking steps by finding new problems, new solutions, and then new problems again. The root of innovation is exactly the same as it was when our species was born: looking at something and thinking, “I can make this better.”"
"“If I’d had two or even three hundred pages I would have abandoned The Stand and gone on to something else—God knows I had done it before.13 But five hundred pages was too great an investment, both in time and in creative energy.” King will throw away three hundred single-spaced typewritten pages, about sixty thousand words, which will have taken him more than a month to write, if he feels they are not good enough."
"There is a myth about how something new comes to be. Geniuses have dramatic moments of insight where great things and thoughts are born whole. Poems are written in dreams. Symphonies are composed complete. Science is accomplished with eureka shrieks. Businesses are built by magic touch. Something is not, then is. We do not see the road from nothing to new, and maybe we do not want to."
- →The conclusion: “Group brainstorming, over a wide range of group sizes, inhibits rather than facilitates creative thinking.” The groups produced fewer and worse results because they were more likely to get fixated on one idea and because, despite all exhortations to the contrary, some members felt inhibited and refrained from full participation.
- →Most researchers now regard incubation as folk psychology—a popular belief but wrong.40 Almost all of the evidence suggests the same thing: Caterpillars do not cocoon in the unconscious mind. The butterflies of creation come from conscious thinking.
- →Great creators know that the best step forward is often a step back—to scrutinize, analyze, and assess, to find faults and flaws, to challenge and to change. You cannot escape a maze if you only move forward. Sometimes the path ahead is behind.
- →Minds do not leap. Observation, evaluation, and iteration, not sudden shifts of perception, solve problems and lead us to creation. We can see this using Duncker’s technique: observing people solving his most famous problem.
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