How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention, and Discovery

The most important thing creators do is work. The most important thing they don’t do is quit.

If your idea succeeds, everybody says you’re persistent. If it doesn’t succeed, you’re stubborn.

Confidence is belief in yourself. Certainty is belief in your beliefs. Confidence is a bridge. Certainty is a barricade.

Beginning is hard, but continuing is harder. Those who seek a glamorous life should not pursue art, science, innovation, invention, or anything else that needs new. Creation is a long journey where most turns are wrong and most ends are dead.

Time is the raw material of creation. Wipe away the magic and myth of creating and all that remains is work:

Having ideas is not the same thing as being creative. Creation is execution, not inspiration. Many people have ideas; few take the steps to make the thing they imagine.

In 1926, Alfred North Whitehead made a noun from a verb and gave the myth its name: creativity.

Creating is not extraordinary, even if its results sometimes are. Creation is human. It is all of us. It is everybody.

Intellectually secure people do not need to show anyone how smart they are. They are empirical and seek truth. Intellectually insecure people need to show everyone how smart they are. They are egotistical and seek triumph.

The greatest test of your expertise is how explicitly you understand your assumptions.

Because people who are more creative also tend to be more playful, unconventional, and unpredictable, and all of this makes them harder to control. No matter how much we say we value creation, deep down, most of us value control more. And so we fear change and favor familiarity. Rejecting is a reflex.

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.

Almost nothing we create will be good the first time. It will seldom be bad. It will probably be a dull shade of average. The main virtue of a first sketch is that it breaks the blank page. It is a spark of life in the swamp, beautiful if only because it is a beginning.

interruption slows us down. No matter how little time is stolen by interruption, we lose even more time reconnecting to our work. Interruption causes twice as many mistakes. Interruption makes us angry.

Unfulfilled passion creates a cavity between our present and our potential—a void that can drip with destruction and despair.

Passion is the most extreme state of choice without reward. Or, rather, it is its own reward, an energy that is indifferent to outcomes, even when they include missed sleep, becoming poor, losing your friends, bleeding and bruising, even death.

The bias against new is a prejudice a bit like sexism and racism: we know it is socially unacceptable to “dislike” creation, we sincerely believe we “like” creation, but when presented with a specific creative idea, we are more likely to reject it than we realize.

Listen, and you hear creation. It is in the sound of passing sirens; distant music; church bells; cell phones; lawn mowers and snow blowers; basketballs and bicycles; waves on breakers; hammers and saws; the creak and crackle of melting ice cubes; even the bark of a dog, a wolf changed by millennia of selective breeding by humans; or the purr of a cat, the descendant of one of just five African wildcats that humans have been selectively breeding for ten thousand years.

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. Artistry must be misty magic, not sweat and grind. It dulls the luster to think that every elegant equation, beautiful painting, and brilliant machine is born of effort and error, the progeny of false starts and failures, and that each maker is as flawed, small, and mortal as the rest of us. It is seductive to conclude that great innovation is delivered to us by miracle via genius. And so the myth.

When Robin Warren accepted his Nobel Prize, he quoted Sherlock Holmes: “There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.” It was an “obvious fact” that bacteria do not live in the stomach, just as it was an “obvious fact” that emergency room doctors remember to remove guidewires and an “obvious fact” that there are no gorillas in pictures of lungs.

When you bring something truly new to the world, brace. Having an impact is not usually a pleasant experience. Sometimes the hardest part of creating is not having an idea but saving an idea, ideally while also saving yourself.

The creativity myth implies that few people can be creative, that any successful creator will experience dramatic flashes of insight, and that creating is more like magic than work. A rare few have what it takes, and for them it comes easy. Anybody else’s creative efforts are doomed.

The art of new, and perhaps the art of happiness, is not absolute victory for either new or old but balance between them. Birds do not defy gravity or let it bind them to the ground. They use it to fly.

Ritual is optional, but consistency is not. Creating requires regular hours of solitude. Time is your main ingredient, so use the highest-quality time to create.

Addiction destroys, passion creates, and that is the only difference between them.

Rejection is not persecution. Drain it of its poison and what remains may be useful.

Creating is to humans as flying is to birds. It is our nature, our spirit.

Minds do not leap. Observation, evaluation, and iteration, not sudden shifts of perception, solve problems and lead us to creation.