How to Unlock Creativity
June 28, 2011 by Kevin Michael Gray
Do you know this guy on the left? Of course you do! The man, and in particular that photo, are icons. They represent creativity itself.
Yet Einstein is both an inspiration and an intimidation. His legend, unfortunately, has obscured much his story’s true value. He was, in many ways, unexceptional, but nevertheless managed to see the world differently and led others to do so as well.
Although obviously intelligent, he showed no special early aptitude. He was neither rich nor poor. While not tremendously popular as a child, he was no loner either. His extraordinarily genius was very much the product of a method and it is one which we can all follow.
Intense Domain Knowledge
Many believe that in order to be creative you must eschew conventional ideas and Einstein is often held up as an example. He isn’t.
Despite apocryphal stories that he failed math class, Einstein was a good, if unruly, student. He studied physics intensely, worked towards a doctorate and sought out a job as an ordinary physics professor. It was his poor lecturing ability (and possibly his poor behavior towards a professor) that kept him from a more conventional academic career.
Moreover, even his legendary burst of creativity in 1905, during what is now called his miracle year, focused on topics widely discussed among physicists of the time. His discoveries utilized concepts such as Planck’s law and Maxwell’s equations, standard for physicists but impenetrable to laymen, even today.
So while it’s true that he was somewhat of an outsider to the ivory towers of the physics community, it wasn’t by choice. He was, in fact, struggling to gain acceptance (of both himself and his doctoral dissertation). In a similar vein, the most creative people I have known have all been avid students of their field.
It helps to know what the rules are before you set out to break them.
A Good Problem
When he was a boy, Einstein daydreamed about riding on a beam of light. As Maxwell’s equations proposed that the speed of light was constant, this created an interesting problem. What would he see while traveling on a light beam? Later Einstein would pose another question – What would it be to ride on an elevator in space?
Both of these seemingly simple queries led to breakthrough discoveries. From the first, Einstein inferred that if the speed of light is constant then time and space must be relative. From the second, he guessed that motion and gravity were similar phenomena. These insights are the essence of special and general relativity, respectively.
One of the most salient aspects of Einstein’s method was that his ability to frame problems was just as valuable, and as valued, when he was wrong. He came out on the losing end of his famous debates with Bohr, but the questions he posed helped shape physics for decades.
One of Einstein’s most famous mistakes, the EPR paradox, led to the successful teleportation of light photons at IBM labs in 1993. It was because of his ability to distill important concepts that Einstein’s failures were often more fruitful than most people’s successes.
Crossing Domains
We often get so wrapped up in our own area of expertise – its paradigms, practices and social networks – that we fail to look elsewhere for insights. That’s a mistake. Great creativity comes from breadth as much as depth.
As I wrote in an earlier post, breakthrough discoveries often come through synthesizing knowledge from disparate domains. Here are some examples:
Einstein and Hume: Although Einstein’s focus was on physics, he read philosophy extensively. He was particularly influenced by David Hume and his ideas about skepticism and the problem of induction.
While Hume argued strenuously for the primacy of empirical knowledge, he noted that that our reliance on past experience can lead us astray. He rightly pointed out that even our belief that the sun will rise tomorrow is mainly a function of expediency and convenience.
This was a particularly useful insight for the problems that Einstein was working on. Although we experience time and space as constant and perceive gravity to be something completely different than motion, Einstein realized that the truth might be otherwise. That, along with his diligence in working out the math, is how he changed the world.
