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Any seemingly grand idea can be divided into an infinite series of smaller, previously known ideas. An entire television series called Connections (by science historian James Burke) was dedicated to exploring the theme of the surprising relationships between ideas and their interconnectedness throughout history.
Instead of wanting to innovate, a process demanding hard work and many ideas, most want to have innovated. The myth of epiphany tempts us to believe that the magic moment is the grand catalyst; however, all evidence points to its more supportive role.
The part of the story that’s overlooked, like Newton’s apple tale, is that Archimedes spent significant time trying and failing to find solutions to the problem before he took the bath. The history is sketchy at best, but I suspect he took the bath as stress relief from the various pressures of innovation.
During the early period, hours or days are spent understanding the problem and immersing oneself in the domain. An innovator might ask questions like “What else in the world is like this?” and “Who has solved a problem similar to mine?”, learning everything he can and exploring the world of related ideas. And then there is a period of incubation in which the knowledge is digested, leading to experiments and rough attempts at solutions. Sometimes there are long pauses during incubation when progress stalls and confidence wanes, an experience the Greeks would have called “losing the muse.”
Edison, Darwin, da Vinci, Michelangelo, and van Gogh all regularly switched between different projects, occasionally in different fields, possibly accelerating an exchange of ideas and seeding their minds for new insights.
In psychology books, the talent for taking two unrelated concepts and finding connections between them is called associative ability. In his book Creativity in Science: Change, Logic, Genius, and Zeitgeist, Dean Simonton points out that “persons with low associative barriers may think to connect ideas or concepts that have very little basis in past experience or that cannot easily be traced logically.”
Recent history has similar problems. Most Americans are taught that Columbus was a hero who navigated dangerous seas to discover the place we call home, who fought for the supposedly innovative belief that the world was round. (This is a bizarre myth because sailors since ancient times knew the world was a sphere — they just didn’t know how large it was.[32])
The shocking secret, which explains why teachers torture children with endless trivia, is that there is no objective history.
Innovating comes at a price: it might be money, time, sanity, friends, or marriages, but there will definitely be one.
The majority of innovations come from dedicated people in a field working hard to solve a well-defined problem.
The founders of many great companies initially planned to sell their ideas and designs to larger corporations but, unable to sell, reluctantly chose to go it alone. Google tried to sell to Yahoo! and AltaVista, Apple to HP and Atari, and Carlson (photocopier inventor) to nearly every corporation he could find.
Steve Jobs, founder of Apple and Pixar, was asked, “How do you systematize innovation?” (a common question among CEOs and the business community). His answer was, “You don’t.”[63] This was not what readers of Business Week expected, but foolish questions often receive disappointing answers.
