Scott Berkun's Blog, page 17

Why has innovation slowed down? (Or has it?)

I do not like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I don’t like it because it’s made up, yet people treat it as a universal law. But it’s an invention. It’s an interesting invention sure, but we’ve taken it to be definitive, which is bunk. Maslow made observations, mostly about American culture and formed them into a framework we often take as predictive for the entire species. There are plenty of other frameworks, including ones that recognize needs are not hierarchical, an observation about your own life that’s easy to make when you stop to consider: do you organize your meals hierarchically? your day? your week? The worthy long and short term ambitions you have likely cut across the “hierarchy” in dozens of reasonable ways.

Recently Carr wrote about the arc of innovation, suggesting that there’s a hierarchy of innovation much like Maslow’s. Carr does point out some of the hierarchy’s flaws, but he still, maddeningly, uses a triangular hierarchy for his model for innovation. (It’s like the insanity of people making everything into periodic tables. What is wrong with you people?) It was always dumb that Maslow, if it was his choice, made it a pyramid. Why is the top level so small? is it really smaller in space? Does the smaller size suggest it’s easier to fulfill? What does it mean? It’s just bad design.

Anyway, the thrust of Carr’s post is about the diminishing returns of modern inventions, and here I agree with him. The common gripe is the rate of change today is faster than ever, but that’s perception. It feels that way certainly, but the amount of change is smaller than in the past.

The leap from steam power to electricity was larger than anything we experienced in modern times, bringing cheap power into workplaces and homes, granting nighttime lighting (which redefined sleep itself!) and thousands of things into the lives of ordinary people. The move from a telephone to a cellphone, as impressive as it is, is far less of a shift and it’s impact smaller on the important parts of our daily lives. This is an opinion of course as all comparisons of the value of two innovations always are. I love the internet, but when you break down how important it is compared to running water, electricity, a nearby market with food, stable democracy, reliable health care and hundreds of other older innovations it’s not even close.

Carr writes:

There has been no decline in innovation; there has just been a shift in its focus. We’re as creative as ever, but we’ve funneled our creativity into areas that produce smaller-scale, less far-reaching, less visible breakthroughs

Part of the problem is smaller breakthroughs, like a bigger screen for your phone, are made incredibly visible through billions in marketing dollars, whereas more substantial improvements that are less profitable are barely noticed (or would have to have the same financial support to become noticed).

There are plenty of holes to poke in Carr’s hierarchy. Healthcare, which would be at the bottom of the pile, constantly sees technological breakthroughs. It’s just that unless you are sick or know someone who is, these breakthroughs do not make the news and are never part of the consumer marketing machine. And of course many inventions slice through the hierarchy, as an app that lets you work with friends by playing games to watch your diet hits nearly every level in one fell swoop.

There are six important themes I see at work in the larger discussion we should have:

Innovation is relative, not universal. There is no universal index of progress. America is still struggling to provide universal health care, while many European countries already have it. Japan has fast trains, America does not. Progress are regress are always shifting around the world, and with contries, cities and neighborhoods. There is no universal constant. Even now America is divided on who has access to what innovations. From this perspective innovation in some third world countries is at an all time peak. This is why grand arguments about the pace of innovation seem esoteric to me.
Decline of research funding. The peak of U.S. Federal spending on science research and development was in the 1960s. Every major invention that makes up the internet was developed decades ago. It’s science where true breakthroughs happen, and by breakthrough I mean the acquisition of new knowledge. It takes years, decades, for that knowledge to be converted into products or solutions, and we may have ridden out the major wave from 50 years ago. Who is investing in the next wave for all of us? It won’t be a corporation (although what Tesla did is interesting).
There are only financial rewards for some breakthroughs. The marketplace will rarely invest in true discoveries since they are far too expensive to find. It’s possible that the most transformative technology advancements require government support as no corporation could ever afford to develop them.
The best ideas don’t necessarily become popular. We have faith that progress is a straight line, but history makes clear it isn’t even a line at all. A slowdown in technological advancement might be because of other factors, social, political (The last Congress passed fewer laws than any in history) and economic, that have nothing to do with the invention or ideas themselves.
Consumer culture has shifted our perceptions on innovation. Will the latest cell phone improve your contributions to social justice? Will an app upgrade save your marriage? Strengthen your community? America is more of a consumer culture than ever before, and that is part of Carr’s point: “We’re getting precisely the kind of innovation that we desire – and that we deserve.” But then the issues are philosophical, not technological. How did we become so shallow and lost? Were we always shallow and lost? The answers are not going to come from technologists and businesspeople.
Infrastructure is hard to replace.  My point about the primacy of running water and electricity is really about infrastructure. You only get one chance to make certain choices about a city, or a nation. It’s extremely expensive to change these large decisions later, or even with the money on hand, it’s hard for a government to bet on a new approach. The 1950s was when America made its big bet about transportation, and we chose cars over everything else. Which suggests that American may be past it’s innovation prime. Our infrastructure was among the best in the world in 1965. But now, we’re in trouble.  It’s a mature nation, with aging technology infrastructure, and bureaucracies and traditions that inhibit big changes.  The U.S. is 10th in the world in providing broadband internet, something we basically invented. The future of big advancements might be shifting, or have already shifted, to countries with hungrier cultures. We need to reinvest, but do we have the will?

How much do authors really earn? Some answers

Ann Bauer recently wrote at Salon on Why it’s a problem that writers never talk about where their money comes from. She’s wrong – they do talk about it. Not everyone does of course, but enough that a few web searches will find them. I guess she didn’t do much research before writing this? Independent authors talk about it more, but with a handful of web searches I found plenty of examples.

Some of these links I’d seen before and some I researched in ten minutes this morning.

Scalzi on Fitzgerald. Scalzi on Scalzi, Scalzi on why he publishes his earnings
Paul Kemp and Michael Sullivan (Reddit)
How I Make A Living, In Detail (by me)
Payscale.com for Writers/Authors
Self-Published author earnings (Guardian)
How much do Kindle singles authors make?
(Know of other authors who have published similar posts? leave a comment with a link)

Bauer’s essay is well written and an admission of her being “sponsored by her spouse” and depending on family is a common way for artists to start, or maintain their careers (e.g. Van Gogh depended primarily on his brother Theo). But it’s still a surprise to many that most books don’t sell well and 100k are published every year in the U.S. alone. In the news we almost exclusively hear about famous bestselling authors who make more than 95% of all authors living or dead ever did. Writing has never been and never will  be an easy way to make a living. Almost no one is forced to be an author – it’s a choice.

Many authors have and continue to write about their finances and how they made it or try to make it work. Give them a read (above) and if you appreciate their forthcomingness, thank them.

I’m Overwhelmed By Fear. How Do I Gain Confidence?

Each week I take the top voted question from readers and answer it (submit one here). I jumped this one to the top, submitted by F.B., as it’s urgent in nature.

I am overwhelmed by fear after a bad biking accident and realizing how fragile everything is in our human consciousness. How do I gain confidence from here?

Many platitudes come to mind but I’m always weary of platitudes especially in heavy situations like yours. They’re so easy to offer, yet I know from my own experience with horrible times that when I heard them they didn’t help. But people don’t know what to say when someone is hurting, so we resort to the safe things we’ve heard before. I strongly recommend talking to close friends, fellow bikers, and a therapist or counselor. You need to find support, now, for your feelings and get on a path to sorting yourself out and it’s people who know you best who know how to help you when you’re scared and can get beyond platitudes. Your situation is not unique, although if you have an ego like mine, you probably have so much guilt and self-blame that you think that it is.

My darker answer is humanity is a wonder and a mystery.  How we’re able to do any of the things we do in this world is, from a certain perspective, beyond comprehension. Every time I’m in a high rise office building and look out the window down to a highway, I  have the same thought: how is it that there aren’t *more* accidents? Thousands of people fly down highways at 70mph, all a just a few feet apart, operating at the limits of perception and reaction time. They’re all strangers who have no specific reason to care about each other at all, and yet for the most part they do.

Everyone complains about how people drive in their city, yet watching the highways from afar you can’t help but notice how smoothly it works and how amazing it is. How everything in civilization and nature functions is a wonder to me. Even as someone with a designer’s mind and who knows how things are constructed, I’m constantly amazed by electricity, running water, airplanes, DNA, ecosystems and that all of it works so well so much of the time. Every now and then things go wrong, sometimes it’s someones fault and sometimes not. At the scale of the civilized world it’s unavoidable things go wrong now and then, but it’s a psychological shock when it’s us and not someone we see on the side of the road as we drive on. I was in a mild car accident the other day and even though no one was hurt, it put me off for weeks. It’s my turn, I told myself. My turn to be on the other side of life experience, falling out of the system instead of flowing inside it. I hated how it felt, but I told myself it would be awhile until driving felt like it did before.

My positive answer is you must find your way back to the beginning. Before you were an expert on a bicycle you were a novice. As a novice it took courage to go out on the road at all. You took the safest paths on the quietest roads. You paid attention and worried about every little thing. When you’re ready, which you might not be for awhile, you’ll have to put yourself back into that mindset. Beginners mind.

You have probably thought through ever microsecond of the accident and what you could have done differently. This is good, for awhile. There may be something you can learn, and change, to be a safer rider, but maybe there is no lesson. This is a harder conclusion to accept as our brains demand reasons for everything, but it could be there is no grand lesson. Every situation in life is a compounding of thousands of variables – you can do all the right things and on one day it’s not enough, or do the wrong things another day and by sheer chance it saves your life. We play the probabilities every time we get out bed and walk out the door. Being alive and doing anything interesting comes with some amount of risk no matter how well you do it. Most days we’re too confident to think much about the probabilities, but when something goes very wrong it’s all we think about.

The head game you’ll have to play with yourself is getting past knowing too much. A beginner doesn’t know what a bad accident feels like, and you do. It might be awhile before you even want to ride again. I hate the phrase “you know too much”, even though I just used it, as I don’t think that’s possible. Knowing a lot means you have to learn how to compartmentalize your knowledge, to choose which perspective, or feelings, or memories, you will use when to help you in what you’re trying to do. A good therapist or counselor can help you do this and I recommend you see one. Take it slow. Be patient. It might be weeks or months until you’re ready to start again, if at all (it’s OK if you decide not to ride again. It really is). If you look for stories for situations like yours, you’ll find examples of people who have had harder times and found their way through them. I wish you well.

What I learned at the Civil Rights Museum / MLK

The hotel where Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4th 1968, is now the primary site of the National Civil Rights Museum, and it is a powerful place.  The sign to the hotel and its exterior is preserved for history, the interior thoughtfully converted into a modern museum space. I visited for the first time recently during a road trip through the South of the U.S.

Before the trip I knew the basics of the civil rights movement in America, but was surprised at how much I didn’t know. I’ve had this experience about history before, but it never prevents me from having it again. We always think the major events are enough to help us understand something, but then you dig in and discover how much went on before those major events.

A stop at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute days prior helped broaden my knowledge. There were so many more people who made sacrifices and took personal risks than I ever realized (Fred Shuttleworth’s story was particularly powerful), and the struggle lasted far longer. The effort not only to raise awareness, but to find support was slow, painful, and plagued by brutal setbacks.

I expected, given its location, that the National Civil Rights museum would center on the story of Martin Luther King, Jr. But it was clear in the first few minutes that there were several decades of important developments that led up to the rise of  MLK visibility.

The many dimensions of racism and how proud some town leaders were of their outward defiance of any semblance of civility was disturbing. “Why burn a cross when you can foreclose a loan?” expresses such clear intelligence about what they were doing (economic intimidation). Even if you didn’t agree with these attitudes they were flaunted publicly and pervasively. Who could be brave enough to stand up against this kind of open harassment?

Segregated schools, given their own section in the museum, made clear how racism wasn’t just about the current generation, but also was applied to children, and therefore, the future. How do you divide children? I stood in that room and wondered how lost a people could be to so clearly take opportunities away from future generations. My 21st century eyes struggled to see this in a way that didn’t make me sad for humanity, as much as I didn’t want to see it that way. How do we do this to each other? How have we done this to each other for centuries? It’s impossible not to walk through the museum without feeling mystified about the human species. I’ve felt similar thoughts in Holocaust museums and at WWII sites (See What I Learned in Hiroshima). There is a brutality in our history and in us that we haven’t evolved past, if we ever will.

As I walked through the museum the big question I asked was: what would I do? In every story of awful behavior, vicious cruelty, and repression of ideas, I tried to imagine how I’d respond if I were a victim. What action would I take? Would I have done a sit-in at Woolworth’s? Would I have protested peacefully? Would I have gotten on a Freedom ride? How civil would I be? Would I have been violent? Where? How? How brave would I be, and what would that word even mean? Or would I hide and ignore the whole thing?

And with each step I took from room to room I felt waves of respect for how many people were willing to make sacrifices to make arguments for rights that should have already been theirs (“”I’m tired of marching for something that should have been mine at birth” -MLK). I really don’t know what I would do. I can’t know. But I can try, today, to do something for the causes I believe in and injustices I see.

Out in the streets of Memphis are a series of murals, and had I not gone to the museum I wouldn’t have completely understood what they were about, and how they fit into the larger story.

The famous stories like Rosa Parks, a story I’d learned as a child, always seemed like a singular event in my memory. As did MLK’s I have a dream speech. But it was only during the second half of the experience at the museum before either one was mentioned.

It took years of work and sacrifice before Parks’ protest for there to be enough of a story for hers to get broad attention and have the wider effect it had. The story of Fred Shuttlesworth, a name I first learned in Birmingham, came up many times in the museum, and I was inspired again by his intelligence and courage.

 

Its only towards the end of the story that MLK comes into central focus. In the movement he was a major wave, not the ocean itself, and as obvious as this sounds now, until I’d walked through the museum I’d never had that perspective before, or had it so clear in my mind. The role of the FBI and other government organizations in harassing black leaders was sad too, another reminder of what the status quo was like in the 1960s and how if we believe in progress, there is always something worth improving in any status quo.

From outside on the street there’s a plaque just beneath room 306. I watched many people stop to take a photo of this most famous and tragic place, and then walk on. Like me, before I went inside, I knew this was a horrible and important moment in history, but I didn’t fully understand. I felt sad for the people who moved on without going into the museum.  They were in a historic place, but didn’t understand the history that led to that day.

Standing in the room itself you can’t help but look across the street to where the rifle was fired that killed MLK. It seems so close and so quaint, and it was. There was an ordinary, neighborly grace of civility violated here. It’s an ordinary street, with ordinary buildings, made extraordinary for horrible reasons.

The museum continues across the street, and you can look the opposite way towards the hotel, out the apartment window where the shots that killed MLK were fired. It was not a hard shot to make. The cruelty of it is made worse but how peaceful this place is now and must have been then.

There is a marker in the street that quietly expresses where the shot traveled. It’s a silent, dark memorial, that some visitors might not notice.

Standing in the window was a morbid and disturbing place to stand.  I felt obligated to look and to stop for a moment. I thought about what the world would be like if there was never a reason for a museum like this to exist at all, much less in this specific place. I’m still mystified by how anyone can want to hurt someone who is a leader of a non-violent movement. It’s only cowards, filled with hate they don’t understand, that can act this way.

The museum ends with questions and the idea of community. I like that word. I like the idea of people creating a shared place together where everyone has an approximation of equal opportunity, and everyone contributes to doing what they can to help their neighbors, in the broadest sense of the word.

I strongly recommend visiting the museum. It will put everything going on today in America in a wider, deeper context, which can only help you sort out your feelings and what you want to do or not do about them. There’s so much history we, collectively, have yet to learn from.

What would you have done then?
What will you do about injustice now?

What I learned at the Civil Rights Museum

Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4th 1968, at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. The hotel is now the primary site of the National Civil Rights Museum, and it is a powerful place.  I visited for the first time a few weeks ago during a road trip through the South.

Before I went on the trip I thought I knew the basics of the civil rights movement in America, but was stunned at how much I didn’t know. We always think the major events are enough to help us understand something, but then you dig in and discover there was so much more going on before those major events.

A stop at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute days prior helped broaden my knowledge. There were so many more people who made sacrifices and took personal risks than I ever realized (Fred Shuttleworth’s story was particularly powerful), and the struggle lasted far longer. The effort not only to raise awareness, but to find support was slow, painful, and plagued by brutal setbacks.

I expected, given its location, that the National Civil Rights museum would center on the story of Martin Luther King, Jr. But it was clear in the first few minutes that there were several decades of important developments that led up MLK’s story.

The many dimensions of racism and how proud some town leaders were of their outward defiance of any semblance of civility was disturbing. “Why burn a cross when you can foreclose a loan?” expresses such clear intelligence about what they were doing. Even if you didn’t agree with these attitudes they were flaunted publicly and pervasively. Who could be brave enough to stand up against this kind of open harassment?

Segregated schools, given their own section in the museum, made clear how racism wasn’t just about the current generation, but also was applied to children, and therefore, the future. How do you divide children? I stood in that room and wondered how lost a people could be to so clearly take opportunities away from future generations. My 21st century eyes struggled to see this in a way that didn’t make me sad for humanity, as much as I didn’t want to see it that way. How do we do this to each other? How have we done this to each other for centuries? It’s impossible not to walk through the museum without feeling mystified about the human race. I’ve felt similar thoughts in Holocaust museums and at WWII sites (See What I Learned in Hiroshima). There is a brutality in our history and in us that we haven’t evolved past, if we ever will.

As I walked through the museum the big question I asked was what would I do? In every story of awful behavior, vicious cruelty, and repression of ideas, I tried to imagine how I’d respond. What action would I take? Would I have done a sit-in at Woolworth’s? Would I have protested peacefully? Would I have been violent? Where? How? How brave would I be? How civil would I be? And with each step I took from room to room I felt waves of respect for how many people were willing to make sacrifices to make arguments for rights that should have already been theirs. I really don’t know what I would do. I can’t know.

Out in the streets of Memphis are a series of murals, and had I not gone to the museum I wouldn’t have completely understood what they were about, and how they fit into the larger story.

The famous stories like Rosa Parks, a story I’d learned as a child, always seemed like a singular event in my memory. As did MLK’s I have a dream speech. But it was most of the way through the experience at the museum before either one was mentioned.

It took years of work and sacrifice before Parks’ protest for there to be enough of a story for hers to get broad attention and have the wider effect it had. The story of Fred Shuttlesworth, a name I first learned in Birmingham, came up many times in the museum, and I was inspired again by his intelligence and courage.

 

Its only towards the end of the story that MLK comes into central focus. In the movement he was a major wave, not the ocean itself, and as obvious as this sounds now, until I’d walked through the museum I’d never had that perspective before, or had it so clear in my mind.

From outside on the street there’s a plaque just beneath room 306. I watched many people stop to take a photo of this most famous and tragic place, and then walk on. Like me, before I went inside, I knew this was a horrible and important moment in history, but I didn’t fully understand. I felt sad for the people who moved on without going into the museum.  They were in a historic place, but didn’t understand the history that led to that day.

Standing in the room itself you can’t help but look across the street to where the rifle was fired that killed MLK. It seems so close and so quaint, and it was. It’s an ordinary street, with ordinary buildings, made extraordinary for horrific reasons.

The museum continues across the street, and you can look out the window where the shots were fired. There is a marker in the street that quietly expresses where the shot traveled. It’s a silent, dark memorial, that some visitors might not notice.

Standing in the window was a morbid and disturbing place to stand.  I felt obligated to look and to stop for a moment. I thought about what the world would be like if there was never a reason for a museum like this to exist at all, much less in this specific place. I’m still mystified by how anyone can want to hurt someone else who is a leader of non-violence. It’s only cowards, filled with hate they don’t understand, that can act this way.

The museum ends with questions and the idea of community. I like that word. I like the idea of people creating a shared place together where everyone has an approximation of equal opportunity, and everyone contributes to doing what they can to help their neighbors, in the broadest sense of the word.

I strongly recommend visiting the museum. It will put everything going on today in America in a wider, deeper context, which can only help you sort out your feelings and what you want to do or not do about them. There’s so much history we, collectively, have yet to learn from.

My Writing Process: A summary of writing on writing

Each week I take the top voted question from readers and answer it (submit one here). There were two questions, one from Jasmine Carver and the other from Aron Grinshtein about my writing process (with a total of  1660 votes) and I’m answering them together.

What are the creative processes you go through when writing?

I start with the first word of the first sentence and then write the second word. I continue with words until the sentence is done and then I move on to the next sentence. Ok, that’s not useful. Sorry! It’s just hard to take questions like this too seriously as I don’t think there is anything magical in any writer’s process. You have to do the work and as you do the work you figure out which process works best for you. The two words creative and process are oxymoronic in this sense, as anything strictly procedural would by definition not be very creative. Seeing famous writer’s habits is interesting and can give you ideas, but you won’t know what works for you without doing the work.

I’ve written often about how I work and my advice for other writers. Here’s a list:

The Three Writing Mindsets (Raw, Run, Review)
My Process for Blogging (and my daily “process”)
Video of me writing a 1000 word essay (timelapsed to 5 mins, w/commentary)
How To Get From an Idea to a Book
How To Revise a First Draft
How to Write a Second Draft
What Copyeditors do
Why You Fail At Writing
How To Stay Motivated
Is Your Book Idea Good?
See all of my posts on writing

What is your writing setup like?

My desk looks like this. I have a Mac Air and a 27″ Cinema display.  I like working on a big monitor, but other than that I can write nearly anywhere. I usually carry a moleskin notebook wherever I go so I can write or sketch, and I also take notes on my iPhone 4s. I read primarily on an iPad mini 2 using the Kindle app. When at my desk I often have music playing or listen to the news while working. I have different playlists and change which one I’m listening to depending on my mood and what kind of concentration I need.

When you wrote your first book what motivated you to start?

The first book I wrote, about the design of the London underground,  was never published. You can read all of my blog posts about the project from 2005. My motivation was to deliver on an idea I had. Many people have ideas for movies or books and I was one of them, the only difference was I committed the time to try and bring the idea into the world. My larger motivation was to see if I could make a living doing something other than managing software projects. While this book was never finished the experience of writing it did give me the confidence to write Making Things Happen, which started my career as an author.

Once you started what different things did you have to think about and how did you confront them?

The biggest challenge is sustaining interest, for myself and for the imagined reader.When you start writing you have have the excitement of the new on your side, but that fades and you slowly realize just how much work you will need to do to deliver on the idea. It’s important for me to have an outline as that helps divide and conquer the work. It’s easier to stay motivated if you can focus on small units of work. The scale of a book is too large for most people to keep in their mind at one time, but a chapter, or a section is easier. When I get stuck or I’m unmotivated it often means I need to break down the size of the units of work further or revise the outline.

I always read at least a dozen books in the form and style of the book I’m trying to write. For The Ghost of My Father I read many memoirs. For The Year Without Pants I read many first person journalistic books. There is no better way to understand what you want to do than studying what other good writers have already done.

I always focus on getting to a first draft. It doesn’t matter if I limp my way there or not. When I have a first draft I can read the entire thing and get a sense for how it all fits together (or more precisely, doesn’t fit together. If a first draft fits together perfectly it means I didn’t take enough risks in the draft). I like to think of books as fractals. The same loop of writing a draft for the entire book applies to each chapter, and for each section within each chapter. If progress is slow, I focus on a small unit of measure.

Reading well is central to writing well. When reading a draft I ask questions like:

What breaks the flow of the story?
Is this interesting?
How do I make this interesting? Or do I rip this out?
How can this be smoother?
Why would anyone still be reading?
Does this line up with the promise of the book?
If I rip out this section will it make everything else better?
How can I say this in a more interesting and simpler way?
Can I show this rather than tell it? Is there a story I can use?

Mostly I pay attention to things that break the flow and stand out in a negative way. Coleridge described the suspension of disbelief for fiction, and I believe in something similar for non-fiction: the continuation of curiosity. The title of the book itself generates a certain curiosity for the reader and my job as the writer is to carry that through an entire 8 to 12 hour experience. The job of each sentence is to make the reader want to read the next one. If I can repeat this for every sentence in the book I’ve done well.

Did you go through the same thought processes for each book? If not, how did they change?

The Myths of Innovation was the most journalistic of my early books. I spent far more time studying history and interviewing people than any of my other book projects (see the bibliography). I wanted to write a book that was a contribution to knowledge in a formal, collegiate sense, and that demanded more thorough research and study. But the process is the same: collect notes, interview people, develop an outline, write a draft. The unpublished novel I wrote followed the same basic process.

You can find all my posts about writing well here. Have a question about writing or something else you want me to answer? Ask here.

The Myth of Epiphany

One of the most provocative chapters of The Myths of Innovation is The Myth of Epiphany (see the popular book summary). This myth holds that there is something magical about how ideas come to us, and that breakthrough ideas frequently come to people as a result of a flash of insight.

I studied the many well known stories of flashes of insight in history and found most of the them were legends or exaggerations. One of my favorite accountings was Tim Berners-Lee describing how he invented the World Wide Web, one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century:

“Journalists have always asked me what the crucial idea was or what the singular event was that allowed the web to  exist one day when it hadn’t before. They are frustrated when I tell them there was no Eurkea moment. It was not like the legendary apple falling on Newton’s head to demonstrate the concept of gravity… it was a process of accretion [growth by gradual addition]”

Journalists and readers are fond of flashes of insight because we love dramatic stories. The notion of an epiphany ties back to religious and spiritual concepts like the Muse, where there are forces at work in the universe than can grant things to people. Even if we don’t literally believe in these forces we love the notion that creativity works through some system, and that all we need is one brilliant moment, like winning the lottery, that will change everything for us.

There are three important questions to ask about any famous epiphany story:

What was the person doing before the epiphany? In most cases they were working in their field trying to solve a problem, or building a project, and the work led them to learn things that increased the odds of making a breakthrough.
What did they need to do after the epiphany to bring the idea to the world? In every case there was significant, challenging work after the flash to develop the idea into a prototype, much less a working solution.  A brilliant idea for a movie or a business still demands years of effort to realize the idea. An epiphany is rarely the end of the challenge, but typically the beginning of a new one. While epiphanies are common, people willing to commit years of work to see them to fruition are uncommon.
What can we learn about how to have an epiphany ourselves? Most epiphany stories have no substance. They focus on seemingly ordinary facts, like Archimedes in a bathtub or Newton by a tree, where the discovery is presented as a surprise. Epiphany stories rarely teach us anything to do differently in our own lives as there are no useful patterns or habits suggested by the story.

Even the Newton apple story isn’t true in the way it’s commonly told. Newton certainly wasn’t hit on the head, and it’s unlikely that the singular moment of watching an apple fall from a tree, even if it happened, carried particular significance to a man who made daily observations and ran frequent experiments testing his ideas about the things he saw. The lesson about creativity from Newton we should learn is his daily habits: he frequently asked questions and ran experiments, constantly trying new approaches and making prototypes to explore his ideas. But that’s not nearly as exciting a story to tell as the apple tale, so it’s rarely told..

Gordon Gould, a primary inventor of the laser beam, had this to say:

In the middle of one Saturday night… the whole thing suddenly popped into my head and I saw how to build the laser… but that flash of insight required the 20 years of work I had done in physics and optics to put all of the bricks of that invention in there

Most legendary stories of flashes of insight are like Gould’s: the inventor rarely obsesses about the epiphany, but everyone else does. Flashes of insight are best understood as our subconscious minds working on our behalf. In professor of psychology Csikszentmihalyi’s book Creativity he defines epiphany as having three parts: early, insight, and after. The insight feels like a flash because until the moment our subconscious mind surfaces an idea, we’re not fully aware that our minds are still working on the problem for us. We get ideas in the shower because it’s a place where it’s easier for our subconscious minds to speak up.

One way to think about the experience of epiphany is that it’s the moment when all of the pieces fall into place. But this does not require that the last piece has any particular significance (the last piece might be the hardest, but it doesn’t have to be). Whichever piece of the puzzle is sorted out last becomes the epiphany piece and brings the satisfying epiphany experience. However the last piece isn’t necessarily more magical than the others, and has no magic without its connection to the other pieces. It feels magical for psychological reasons, fueling the legend and myths about where the insight happened and why it was at that particular moment and not another.

Read more about the other Myths of Innovation, watch a lecture about the Myth of Epiphany (below), or buy the bestselling book to understand how ideas really work and how to use this to help your own creativity.

The Myth of Ephiphany

One of the most provocative chapters of The Myths of Innovation is The Myth of Epiphany (see book summary). This myth holds that there is something magical about how ideas come to us, and that breakthrough ideas frequently come to people as a result of a flash of insight.

I studied the most well known stories of flashes of insight in history and found most of the them were legends or exaggerations. One of my favorite accountings was Tim Berners-Lee describing how he invented the World Wide Web, one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century:

“Journalists have always asked me what the crucial idea was or what the singular event was that allowed the web to  exist one day when it hadn’t before. They are frustrated when I tell them there was no Eurkea moment. It was not like the legendary apple falling on Newton’s head to demonstrate the concept of gravity… it was a process of accretion [growth by gradual addition]”

Journalists and readers are fond of flashes of insight because we love dramatic stories. The notion of an epiphany ties back to religious and spiritual concepts like the Muse, where there are forces at work in the universe than can grant things to people. Even if we don’t literally believe in these forces we love the notion that creativity works through some system, and that all we need is one brilliant moment, like winning the lottery, that will change everything for us.

There are three important questions to ask about any famous epiphany story:

What was the person doing before the epiphany? In most cases they were doing work in their field trying to solve a problem of some kind that led them to learn many things that increased the odds of making a breakthrough.
What did they need to do after the epiphany to bring the idea to the world? In every case there was significant and challenging work to develop the idea into a prototype, much less a working solution.  A brilliant idea for a movie or a business still demands years of effort to realize the idea. An epiphany is rarely the end of the challenge, but typically the beginning of a new one for those willing to commit to the idea. While epiphanies are common, people willing to commit years of work to see them to fruition are rare.
What can we learn about how to have an epiphany ourselves? Most epiphany stories have no substance. They focus on seemingly ordinary facts, like Archimedes in a bathtub or Newton by a tree, where the discovery is presented as a surprise. Epiphany stories rarely teach us anything to do differently in our own lives as there are no useful patterns or habits suggested by the story.

Even the Newton apple story isn’t true in the way it’s commonly told. Newton certainly wasn’t hit on the head, and it’s unlikely that the singular moment of watching an apple fall from a tree, even if it happened, carried particular significance to a man who made daily observations and ran frequent experiments testing his ideas about the things he saw. The lesson about creativity from Newton we should learn is his daily habits: he frequently asked questions and ran experiments, constantly trying new approaches and making prototypes to explore his ideas. But that’s not nearly as exciting a story to tell as the apple tale, so it’s rarely told..

Gordon Gould, the primary inventor of the laser beam, had this to say:

In the middle of one Saturday night… the whole thing suddenly popped into my head and I saw how to build the laser… but that flash of insight required the 20 years of work I had done in physics and optics to put all of the bricks of that invention in there

Most legendary stories of flashes of insight are like Gould’s: the inventor rarely obsesses about the epiphany, but everyone else does. Flashes of insight are best understood as our subconscious minds working on our behalf. In professor of psychology Csikszentmihalyi’s book Creativity he defines epiphany as having three parts: early, insight, and after. The insight feels like a flash because until the moment our subconscious mind surfaces an idea, we’re not fully aware that our minds are still working on the problem for us. We get ideas in the shower because it’s a place where it’s easier for our subconscious minds to speak up.

One way to think about the experience of epiphany is that it’s the moment when all of the pieces fall into place. But this does not require that the last piece has any particular significance (the last piece might be the hardest, but it doesn’t have to be). Whichever piece of the puzzle is sorted out last becomes the epiphany piece and brings the satisfying epiphany experience. However the last piece isn’t necessarily more magical than the others, and has no magic without its connection to the other pieces. It feels magical for psychological reasons, fueling the legend and myths about where the insight happened and why it was at that particular moment and not another.

Read more about the other Myths of Innovation, watch a lecture about the Myth of Epiphany (below), or buy the bestselling book to understand how ideas really work and how to use this to help your own creativity.

Why Small Ideas Can Matter More Than Big Ideas

Americans are preoccupied by the size of things: big houses, big sandwiches, and big salaries. At leadership retreats, and in the bestselling books we buy, we seek grand thoughts. The basic logic we use is the bigger the idea, the bigger the value, but often that’s not true. There’s a myth at work here: the assumption that big results only come from radical changes. There’s good evidence for a counter-argument. The problems that plague organizations, or hold them back from greatness, are often small things that happen to be consistently overlooked. The lack of progress or greatness isn’t because there’s a grand idea missing. Instead the cause is a simple idea prevented by bureaucracy, killed out of ignorance, or buried under incompetence. If those simpler, smaller, ideas were set free, the effect would be as potent as any grand theory. Somehow we discount simple ideas for being playthings, for being too small to be worthy, not recognizing the surprising power hidden in what seem to be our smallest decisions.

The McDonalds brothers had a very simple idea. They made hamburgers at a few stands in San Bernardino, California. And as any reasonable owners would do, they wanted to run those stands efficiently. How did they do that? They tried to make the process for making food repeatable, an assembly line for food construction. Any homemaker or line cook of the 1950s made the same discovery, as making school lunches, or eggs over easy, again and again motivates this kind of thinking. Had you shown the McDonalds’ business plan to any of the great business minds of the day, they’d have thought you were insane: they’d have said the idea wasn’t big enough to warrant interest of any kind. Fifty years later, McDonalds has 30,000 locations and $22 billion in revenue. Certainly not all of that value can be attributed to the simple notion of creative efficiency, but dedication to the notion did enable their early domination of competitors. The point is simple: a small idea, applied consistently well, can have disproportionately large effects. Ray Kroc’s insight was not finding a big idea, but in seeing how a little idea, done right, could become big.

Put another way, what I’m describing is leverage. Rather than worrying about the size of an idea, which most people do, it’s more productive to think about the possible leverage an idea has. To do this requires thinking not only about the idea itself, but how it will be used. An idea can have a different amount of leverage depending on where, when and how carefully it is applied. One old idea from one team in your company, reused in the right way on another team unfamiliar with it, might just have transformative effects. In Atul Gawande’s book The Checklist Manifesto, he explains how the simple idea of a task list, something used by aircraft pilots for decades, has improved patient safety in surgery by 30% or more. Hospitals didn’t need a breakthrough technology. There wasn’t a new theory or grand vision. A simple act, with a simple, old tool, had incredible, and surprising, leverage.

There are many dubious stories in the history of innovation, and some, despite their improbability, make valid points about the nature of ideas. Charles Steinmetz (or Edison, or Tesla, depending on the version of the legend you hear), holder of over 200 patents, retired from General Electric. A complex system had broken, and no one could fix it so they hired him back to consult. Steinmetz found the malfunctioning part and marked it with a piece of chalk. He submitted a bill for $10,000. The GE managers were stunned and asked for an itemized invoice. He sent back the following: Making the chalk mark $1, Knowing where to place the chalk mark $9,999. Ideas are like chalk marks: as simple as they seem, knowing where, when, and why to use even the smallest ones can make all the difference in the world.

[Originally published at Harvard Business as Does Size Matter For Ideas? 5/2010]

3 reasons you should see the movie Wild (if you’re a writer)

Many books are made into movies, but most movies aren’t very good. Movies are hard to make, period. Even with a great book (Wild is based on the memoir of the same name) it’s hard to transfer what makes the book great into a different medium.

For any writer, or reader interested in memoir and storytelling, I recommend going to watch Wild, staring Reese Witherspoon. Here’s why:

It’s a film told from a woman’s perspective. Half our species are women, despite how rarely they are central, or even peripheral (see Bechdel test) to the plots of films. And despite the ads for the movie, the protagonist is not simply a “confused young person on a journey”. She’s well portrayed as a smart, passionate, creative, sexual and more than anything, interesting as a person. There is a fully realized human being at the film’s center – how often can you say that about any book or film?
Visual memory as storytelling. I won’t go into detail which might ruin your experience, but the film bets on a very different way to explain the main character’s thoughts and memories. The approach they take is  closer to the actual experience of memory and thought, as best we understand it today through science (and through art). Even if you don’t like it, it’s brave and unusual for a major film to use this approach.
Non-traditional story arc. The word verisimilitude means the appearance of being true or real, and the shape of the narrative of the film is unusual, but possibly more realistic in how we experience and tell stories. As a film that centers on a long hike there are many easy cliches to fall into, and Hollywood travel films often gleefully jump into them. The construction of the story itself is more challenging than I expected and I appreciated this while watching the film, and even more so, after it was over.

I read many memoirs and wrote one recently – if you’re interested in personal non-fiction, even as a reader, you should see the film. I haven’t read the book itself, so can’t comment on how they compare.