More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ozan Varol
Read between
October 2 - November 12, 2022
Destruction, as the Red Hot Chili Peppers remind us in Californication, also breeds creation. Instead of withering, Martin’s career blossomed. After he left stand-up, he acted in countless movies, recorded albums, and wrote books and screenplays. He won an Emmy, a Grammy, and an American Comedy award.
modern dictators have abandoned the openly repressive tactics of their predecessors. Today’s authoritarians frequently come to power by democratic elections and then erode democracy through seemingly legitimate means. They conceal authoritarian tactics under the trappings of democracy.
Legend has it that NASA spent a decade and millions of dollars developing a ballpoint pen that would work in zero gravity and function in extreme temperatures. The Soviets used a pencil.
Simple also has fewer points of failure. Complicated things break more easily. This principle is as true in rocket science as it is in business, computer programming, and relationships. Every time you introduce complexity to a system, you’re giving it one more aspect that can fail. As the safety manager for Apollo 8 remarked, the spacecraft had 5.6 million parts, and “even if all functioned with 99.9 percent reliability, we could expect 5,600 defects.”
“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex,” economist E. F. Schumacher said in a quote often misattributed to Einstein. “It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”
Accion’s engines are fired after a satellite has been placed in orbit. The size of a deck of cards, the engine can push satellites as big as refrigerators and move them around while they’re floating in orbit. Equipped with these engines, satellites can linger in orbit longer and avoid colliding with the nearly eighteen thousand other pieces of human-made debris and junk circling the planet.
Bailey is just like her engines: She’s humble and understated, but packs tremendous punch. What SpaceX and Blue Origin are doing for rockets, Bailey and her Accion team are doing for the satellites those rockets carry into space.
Paint yourself a vivid picture of the future with the excesses wiped off your plate.
When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge. —albert einstein
Picturing his new thought experiment, he concluded that the man falling freely would not feel his own weight and would instead think he was floating in zero gravity. This conclusion, in turn, led him to another major discovery: Gravity and acceleration are the same.
It took several years to perfect the technology, but the thought experiment eventually led to the invention of instant photography. With the new technology, only seconds, not days, would pass between the click of the shutter and a physical photo in your hands.
Thought experiments are your very own reality-distortion field, your choose-your-own-adventure game—your purple crayon.
In one study, when participants were instructed to imagine themselves as seven-year-olds with free time, they performed better in objective tests of creative thinking.23 For this reason, the MIT Media Lab—devoted to “the unconventional mixing and matching of seemingly disparate research areas”—has a section called Lifelong Kindergarten.
Pursuing a thought experiment—even one that leads nowhere—can lead to breakthroughs. Fantasies, as Walter Isaacson writes, can be “paths to reality.”
Along with my VHS player and Bon Jovi cassettes, boredom had become a relic of the past. Gone were the days when I would lie awake in bed in the morning, bored out of my mind, and daydream for a while before deciding to immerse myself into reality.
As the saying goes, it’s the silence between the notes that makes the music. Isaac Newton was “the least popular professor” on campus because “he’d stop in the middle of a lecture with a creative pause that could extend for minutes,” while his students waited for him to return to earth.
There’s a TV commercial where business executives squeeze themselves into a shower at work. One person asks, “Why are we meeting in the shower?” The boss replies, “Well, ideas always hit me in my shower at home.”
A good footslogging is part of many scientists’ tool kit. Tesla dreamed up the alternating-current motor during a stroll through the Városliget, or city park, in Budapest.44 To ponder difficult problems, Darwin walked down a gravel path called the “sandwalk” near his home in Kent, kicking up stones along the way.45 The physicist Werner Heisenberg devised the uncertainty principle during a late-night walk through a park in Copenhagen.
When people ask Gaiman for advice on how to be a writer, his answer is simple: “Get bored.”48 Stephen King agrees: “Boredom can be a very good thing for someone in a creative jam.”
If you live with the question long enough, “you will gradually, without noticing it, one distant day live right into the answer,” as the poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote.
Despite the similarities between apples and oranges, the idiom thrives because we’re terrible at seeing connections between seemingly dissimilar or unrelated things. In our personal and professional lives, we confine ourselves to comparing apples to apples and oranges to oranges.
the art-training group members significantly improved their observational skills—such as interpreting photographs of retinal disease—as measured in tests conducted at the beginning and the end of the study. “Art training alone,” the study suggests, “can help to teach medical students to become better clinical observers.”
“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.… [T]hey’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.”
Steve Jobs
Einstein called this idea “combinatory play,” which he believed is the “essential feature in productive thought.” 61 Combinatory play requires exposing yourself to a motley coalition of ideas, seeing the similar in the dissimilar, and combining and recombining apples and oranges into a brand-new fruit.
To facilitate cross-pollination, renowned scientists often develop diverse interests. Galileo, for example, was able to spot mountains and plains on the Moon—not because he had a superior telescope, but because his training in painting and drawing enabled him to understand what the bright and dark regions on the Moon represented.
As rocket scientist David Murray explains, Darwin argued that organic material “evolves just as inorganic material does: with minute changes in each descendant that, over time, accumulate to form new biological appendages like eyes, hands, or wings.”
The renowned record producer Rick Rubin tells his bands not to listen to popular songs while they produce an album. They’re “better off drawing inspiration from the world’s greatest museums,” Rubin says, “than finding it in the current Billboard charts.”69 For example, Iron Maiden’s music combines the unlikely elements of Shakespeare, history, and heavy metal. Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” considered one of the greatest rock songs of all time, is like a musical sandwich, blending an opening and closing ballad with hard rock and opera in the middle.
David Bowie was another master blender. When writing lyrics, he used a custom-developed computer program called the Verbasizer.70 Bowie would type up sentences from different sources—newspaper articles, journal entries, and the like—into the Verbasizer, which would cut them up into words and mix and match them. “What you end up with,” Bowie explained, “is a real kaleidoscope of meanings and topic[s] and nouns and verbs all sort of slamming into each other.” These combinations would then serve as inspiration for song lyrics.
He spotted the gridded pattern on the waffle iron and thought that by turning the pattern upside down, he could create a shoe without spikes. He grabbed the waffle iron, took it to his garage, and began to create molds. What came out of these experiments was the Nike Waffle Trainer, a revolutionary shoe with rubber traction that provided better grip and adapted to the running surface.
Medici effect. It refers to the fifteenth-century creative explosion that occurred when the wealthy Medici family brought together in Florence many accomplished individuals from different walks of life—scientists, poets, sculptors, philosophers, and more. As these individuals connected, new ideas blossomed, paving the way for the Renaissance
Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki writes, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.”
Her manuscript was rejected by numerous publishers, until it ended up on the desk of Nigel Newton, the chairman of Bloomsbury Publishing.89 Newton saw potential in the book where his rivals missed it.
This loony project got an appropriately loony title: Project Loon. After delivering internet access to Nimmo the sheep farmer and conducting other test missions, the Loon balloons went on to fly more than thirty million miles. When catastrophic floods hit Peru in early 2017, the balloons came to the rescue. The floods affected hundreds of thousands of people and knocked out the communications network across the country. In less than seventy-two hours, Project Loon showed up on the scene and began delivering basic connectivity to tens of thousands of Peruvians.4 Later that year, after Hurricane
...more
As Robert Kurson writes, the Moon has “controlled tides, guided the lost, lit harvests, inspired poets and lovers, spoke[n] to children.”
“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things,” Kennedy said, “not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” He simply refused to let the existing reality drive his country’s future.
We’re a species of moonshots—though we’ve largely forgotten it.
The story, as you may have guessed, is a microcosm for life. Most of us go after the mice instead of the antelopes. We think the mouse is a sure thing, but the antelope is a moonshot. Mice are everywhere; antelopes are few and far between. What’s more, everyone around us is busy hunting mice. We assume that if we decide to go for antelopes, we might fail and go hungry.
“The story of the human race,” psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote in 1933, “is the story of men and women selling themselves short.”
“Not many people believe that they can move mountains,” David Schwartz says in The Magic of Thinking Big. “So, as a result, not many people do.”
“If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success,” says James Cameron, the filmmaker behind such blockbusters as The Terminator and Titanic.
Michelle Obama dispelled this myth in a 2018 interview. “I have been at probably every powerful table that you can think of,” she explained, “I have worked at nonprofits, I have been at foundations, I have worked in corporations, served on corporate boards, I have been at G-summits, I have sat in at the UN: They are not that smart.”
Take comfort in knowing that Daedalus had his physics all wrong. Air gets cooler, not hotter, as you ascend, so your wings won’t melt. If you pursue the extraordinary, you’ll rise above the stale neural pathways that dominate ordinary thinking. And if you persist—and learn from the inevitable failures that will arise—you’ll eventually grow the wings you need to soar.
During divergent thinking, we don’t think about constraints, possibilities, or budgets. We just throw around ideas, open to whatever might present itself. We become optimists in the way that physicist David Deutsch defines the term—as someone who believes that anything permitted by the laws of physics is doable.
To activate divergent thinking, you must shut down the rational thinker in you, the part responsible for otherwise safe, beneficial grown-up behaviors. Set aside the spreadsheets, and let your brain run wild. Investigate the absurd. Reach beyond your grasp. Blur the line between fantasy and reality.
Research shows that divergent thinking is a portal to creativity. It boosts people’s ability to discover innovative solutions and make new associations. In other words, it lets you compare and connect apples and oranges.
As Stanford business professor Justin Berg writes, “Convergent thinking alone is dangerous because you’re just relying on the past. What will succeed in the future may not resemble what succeeded in the past.”
When Benjamin Franklin was watching the first hot-air balloon with humans aboard take off in 1783, someone asked him, “What good is flight?” Franklin purportedly replied, “It is a child who is just born, one cannot say what it will become.”
Brains work the same way. Left to its own device, your mind strives for the path of least resistance. Comfortable though it may be, order and predictability get in the way of creativity.40 We must provoke and shock our minds the same way that Schwarzenegger shocked his muscles.
Neuroplasticity is a real thing. Your neurons, just like your muscles, can rewire and grow through discomfort. As Norman Doidge, a leading expert in neuroplasticity, explains, the brain can “change its own structure and function in response to activity and mental experience.”41 Through reps and sets, thought experiments and moonshot thinking force our minds to rise above our daily trance.
Michio Kaku, the cofounder of string theory, would agree. “What we usually consider impossible are nothing but engineering problems,” he says. “There’s no law of physics preventing them.”
