by Kevin Ashton
6 | ORDINARY ACTS
The case against genius is clear: too many creators, too many creations, and too little predetermination. So how does creation happen?
The answer lies in the stories of people who have created things. Stories of creation follow a path. Creation is destination, the consequence of acts that appear inconsequential by themselves but that, when accumulated, change the world. Creating is an ordinary act, creation its extraordinary outcome.
Was Edmond’s story ordinary or extraordinary? If we could travel back to Ferréol’s estate in the Réunion of 1841, we would see ordinary acts: a boy following an old man around a garden, a conversation about watermelons, the boy poking around inside a flower. If we returned in 1899, we would see an extraordinary outcome: the island transformed, the world transforming. Knowing the outcome tempts us to retrofit the acts with extraordinariness—to picture Edmond awake all night wrestling with the problem of pollination, having a moment of epiphany in the moonlight, and an enslaved twelve-year-old orphan revolutionizing Réunion and the world.
But creation comes from ordinary acts. Edmond learned about botany through boyish curiosity and daily walks with Ferréol. Ferréol kept up with developments in the science of plants, including the work of Charles Darwin and Konrad Sprengel. Edmond applied this knowledge to vanilla, with the help of a bamboo tool and a child’s small fingers. When we look behind creation’s curtain, we find people like us doing things we can do.
This does not make creating easy. Magic is instant, genius an accident of birth. Take them away and what is left is work.
Work is the soul of creation. Work is getting up early and going home late, turning down dates and giving up weekends, writing and rewriting, reviewing and revising, rote and routine, staring down the doubt of the blank page, beginning when we do not know where to start, and not stopping when we cannot go on. It is not fun, romantic, or, most of the time, even interesting. If we want to create, we must, in the words of Paul Gallico, open our veins and bleed.
There are no secrets. When we ask writers about their process or scientists about their methods or inventors where they get their ideas from, we are hoping for something that doesn’t exist: a trick, recipe, or ritual to summon the magic—an alternative to work. There isn’t one. To create is to work. It is that easy and that hard.
With the myth gone, we have a choice. If we can create without genius or epiphany, then the only thing stopping us from creating is us. There is an arsenal of ways to say no to creating. One, it is not easy, has already been addressed. It is not easy. It is work.
Another is I have no time. But time is the great equalizer, the same for all: twenty-four hours every day, seven days every week, every life a length unknown, for richest and poorest and all between. We mean we have no spare time, a blunt blade in a world whose bestselling literary series was begun by a single mother writing in Edinburgh’s cafés when her infant daughter slept, where a career more than fifty novels long was started by a laundry worker in the furnace room of a trailer in Maine, where world-changing philosophy was composed in a Parisian jail by a prisoner awaiting the guillotine, and where three centuries of physics were overturned in a year by a man with a permanent position as a patent examiner. There is time.
The third no is the big one, the gun to the head of our dreams. Its endless variations all say the same thing: I can’t. Here is the sour fruit of the myth that only the special can create. None of us think we are special, not in the middle of the night, when our faces fluoresce in the bathroom mirror. I can’t, we say. I can’t because I am not special.
We are special, but that does not matter right now. What matters is that we do not have to be. The creativity myth is a mistake born of a need to explain extraordinary outcomes with extraordinary acts and extraordinary characters, a misunderstanding of the truth that creation comes from ordinary people and ordinary work. Special is not necessary.
All that is necessary is to begin. I can’t is not true once we begin. Our first creative step is unlikely to be good. Imagination needs iteration. New things do not flow finished into the world. Ideas that seem powerful in the privacy of our head teeter weakly when we set them on our desk. But every beginning is beautiful. The virtue of a first sketch is that it breaks the blank page. It is the spark of life in the swamp. Its quality is not important. The only bad draft is the one we do not write.
How to create? Why create? The rest of the book is about how and why. What to create? Only you can decide that. You may know. You may have an idea like an itch. But if you do not, don’t worry. How and what are connected: one leads to the other.
1 | KARL
Berlin once stood at the center of the creative world. The city’s theaters reverberated with debuts by Max Reinhardt and Bertolt Brecht. Its nightclubs hosted bawdy burlesque Kabarett. Albert Einstein ascended its Academy of Sciences. Thomas Mann prophesied the perils of National Socialism. The movies Metropolis and Nosferatu premiered to packed houses. Berliners called it the Golden Age: the years of Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Joseph Pilates, Rudolf Steiner, and Fritz Lang.
It was a time and place for thinking about thinking. In Berlin, German psychologists were having radical thoughts about how the human mind works. Otto Selz, a professor in Mannheim, far to the southwest, sowed the seed: he was among the first to propose that thinking was a process that could be scrutinized and described. For most of his contemporaries, the mind was magic and mystery. For Selz, it was mechanism.
But as the 1930s began, Otto Selz heard the boots of doom approaching. He was Jewish. Hitler was rising. Berlin’s celebration of creation was turning apocalyptic. Destruction was coming.
Selz had been asking psychological questions: How did a mind work? Could he measure it? What could he prove? Now he was also asking practical ones: What was going to happen to him? Could he escape it? How much time remained?
And—equally important to him—would his thoughts survive if he did not? His chance to pass them on was brief. In 1933, the Nazis prevented him from working and prohibited others from citing him. His name disappeared from the literature.
But at least one Berliner knew Selz’s work. Karl Duncker was thirty years old when the Nazis banned Otto Selz. Duncker was not Jewish. His appearance was Aryan: fair skin, flaxen hair, and faceted jaw. He was no safer for it. His ex-wife was Jewish, and his parents were Communists. He made two applications to become a professor at the University of Berlin. Both were rejected despite his excellent academic record. In 1935, the school fired him from his job as a researcher. He published his masterwork, On Problem Solving— in which he defied the Nazis by citing Selz ten times—and fled to the United States.
The Golden Age was over. Novelist Christopher Isherwood, teaching English in Berlin, captured its passing:
Today the sun is brilliantly shining; it is quite mild and warm. I go out for my last morning walk, without an overcoat or hat. The sun shines, and Hitler is master of this city. The sun shines, and dozens of my friends—my pupils at the Workers’ School, the men and women I met are in prison, possibly dead or being tortured to death. I catch sight of my face in the mirror of a shop, and am horrified to see that I am smiling. You can’t help smiling, in such beautiful weather. The trams are going up and down the Kleiststrasse, just as usual. They, and the people on the pavement, and the tea-cosy dome of the Nollendorfplatz station have an air of curious familiarity, of striking resemblance to something one remembers as normal and pleasant in the past.
Duncker took a position in the psychology department of Swarthmore College, in Pennsylvania. In 1939, he produced his first paper since arriving in America, coauthored with Isadore Krechevsky, an immigrant who’d left the tiny Lithuanian village of Sventijánskas as a young boy to escape Russian anti-Semitism. Krechevsky, whose encounters with prejudice in the United States had brought him to the edge of abandoning his academic career, was the first American Duncker inspired.
The joint paper, “On Solution-Achievement,” published
in Psychological Review, marks the moment in the history of the mind when America met Berlin. Krechevsky, in the American style of the time, studied learning in rats. Duncker studied thinking in humans. This was so unusual that Duncker had to clarify what thinking meant: “The functional sense of problem-solving, not a special, e.g., imageless, kind of representation.”
In the paper, the two men agreed that solving problems required “a number of intermediate steps,” but Krechevsky noted a crucial difference between Duncker’s ideas and the ones that were prevalent in America: “There is in Duncker’s analysis one major concept which does not find a close parallel in American psychology: in his experiments, the solution to the problem is a meaningful one. The organism can bring to bear experiences from other occasions and comparatively few general experiences can be utilized for problem-solving.”
Duncker had made his first mark. American psychologists experimented on animals and spoke of organisms: train-your-rat psychology. Duncker cared about human minds and meaningful problems. He put his foot to a shovel and broke ground for a cognitive revolution that would take twenty years to build.
In Germany, the Nazis arrested Otto Selz and took him to Dachau, their first concentration camp. They held him there for five weeks.
Duncker published his second paper, on the relationship between familiarity and perception, in the American Journal of Psychology.
In Russia, his brother Wolfgang was captured in Stalin’s Great Purge and murdered in the gulag.
Duncker’s third paper of the year was published in the pioneering journal of philosophy and psychology Mind. His subject was the psychology of ethics. Duncker wanted to understand why people’s moral values varied so much. The paper was nuanced, comprehensive, and poignant. A man devoted to discovering how humans think was trying to make sense of the end of Berlin:
The motive “for the benefit of the State” depends upon whether the State is felt to be the embodiment of the highest values of life or merely a sort of police-station. On the whole moral judgments are based upon the standard meanings of the society in question. Its chief aim is not to be “just,” but to instigate and to enforce its standard meanings and conducts. It is this function which interferes with a purely ethical conduct.
Here was his answer. States can replace ethics with edicts.
At the end of February 1940, Karl Duncker wrote something else.
Dear Mother,
You have been good to me.
Don’t condemn me.
He drove to nearby Fullerton and, while sitting in his car, shot himself in the head with a pistol. He was thirty-seven.
In Amsterdam, the Nazis captured Otto Selz, took him to Auschwitz, and murdered him.
In Berkeley, the University of California awarded a professorship in psychology to a man named David Krech. He had changed his name from Isadore Krechevsky. He was Duncker’s first American coauthor. He went on to have a storied thirty-year career specializing in the mechanics of memory and stimulation.
Krech was one of many people Duncker influenced. Duncker carried Germany’s best and most radical ideas about thinking to the United States and started a revolution he did not live to see. He was a message in a bottle cast from the shores of a dying Berlin. The bottle broke, but not before it had delivered its message.
2 | THE QUESTION OF FINDING
Duncker’s monograph On Problem Solving, which he published in 1935 as he was fleeing Germany, led to a transformation in the science of brain and mind known as the “cognitive revolution” that laid the foundation for our understanding of how people create. For many reasons, including its references to Otto Selz, On Problem Solving was verboten in Hitler’s nation. War arrived. Berlin burned. Copies became rare.
Then, five years after Duncker’s suicide, one of his former students, Lynne Lees, revived the monograph by translating it into English and presenting his bold agenda—“to study productive thinking”—to the world.
Duncker rejected studies of great thinkers. He likened them to lightning—a dramatic display of something “better investigated in little sparks within the laboratory.” He used “practical and mathematical problems because such material is more suitable for experimentation,” but he made it clear that he was studying thought, not puzzles or math. It did not matter what someone was thinking about—the “essential features of problem-solving are independent of the thought-material.”
For millennia, people had been herded into categories: civilized and savage, Caucasian and Negro, man and woman, Gentile and Jew, rich and poor, capitalist and Communist, genius and dullard, gifted and non-gifted. Category determined capacity. By the 1940s, these divisions had been reinforced by “scientists” who evoked the innate potential to organize the human race like a zoo and lock “different” people into cages, sometimes literal ones. Then a Gentile who married a Jew, a son of Communists who emigrated to live among capitalists, a man who collaborated with Jews and women and who had witnessed the horrors caused by the fraud of measuring humanity, showed that human thought has an essence unaffected by scale, subject, or thinker—that our minds all work the same way.
It was radical and controversial, and it shifted the shape of psychology. Duncker’s approach was simple. He gave people problems and asked them to think aloud as they tried to solve them. In this way, he saw the structure of thought.
Thinking is finding a way to achieve a goal that cannot be attained by an obvious action. We want to accomplish something but do not know how, so before we can act we must think. But how do we think? Or, as Duncker phrased it, what is the answer to “the specific question of finding: In what way can a meaningful solution be found?”
We all use the same process for thinking, just as we all use the same process for walking. It is the same whether the problem is big or small, whether the solution is something new or something logical, whether the thinker is a Nobel laureate or a child. There is no “creative thinking,” just as there is no “creative walking.” Creation is a result—a place thinking may lead us. Before we can know how to create, we must know how to think.
Duncker deployed an array of experiments. They included the Abcabc Problem, which asked high school students to work out why numbers in the form 123,123 and 234,234 are always divisible by 13; the Stick Problem, in which babies as young as eight months old were given a stick that enabled them to reach a remote toy; the Cork Problem, where a piece of wood had to be inserted into a door frame even though it was not as long as the door was wide; and the Box Problem, where candles had to be attached to a wall by selecting from objects including thumb tacks and various boxes. Duncker varied his experiments many times until he understood how people think, what helps, and what gets in the way.
One of his conclusions: “If a situation is introduced in a certain perceptual structure, thinking achieves a contrary structure only against the resistance of the former structure.”
Or: old ideas obstruct new ones.
And this was the case with Duncker’s work. Few psychologists read or understood On Problem Solving in its entirety—not because it was complicated but because old ideas made them resist it. Today the monograph is known mostly for the Box Problem, which has been given the misnomer the Candle Problem and also redesigned. It attracted more attention than all the others. Psychologists and people who write about creation have been discussing it for more than fifty years. Here is its modern incarnation:
Picture yourself in a room with a wooden door. The room contains a candle, a book of matches, and a box of tacks. Using only these things, how would you attach the candle to the door so that you can light it, have it burn normally, and create light to read by?
People usually think of three solutions. One is to melt part of the candle and use the melted wax to fix the candle to the door. Another is to tack the candle to the door. Both work, but not very well. The third solution, which occurs to only a minority of people, is to empty out the tack box, tack that to the wall, and use it to hold the candle.
This last solution has a feature the others do not: one of the items, the box, is used for something other than its original purpose. At some point the person solving the problem stops seeing it as a thing for holding the tacks and starts seeing it as a thing for holding the candle.
This shift, sometimes called an insight, is considered important by some people who think about creating. They suspect that there is something remarkable about seeing the box differently, that the shift is a leap like the one we experience when we look at that picture of a vase that might be two faces or the old lady that could be a young lady or the duck that may be a rabbit. Once we make this “leap,” the problem is solved.
Following Duncker’s lead, psychologists have created many similar puzzles. Examples include the Charlie Problem:
Dan comes home one night after work, as usual. He opens the door and steps into the living room. On the floor he sees Charlie lying dead. There is water on the floor, as well as some pieces of glass. Tom is also in the room. Dan takes one quick glance at the scene and immediately knows what happened. How did Charlie die?
And the Prisoner and Rope Problem:
A prisoner was attempting to escape from a tower. He found in his cell a rope that was half long enough to permit him to reach the ground safely. He divided the rope in half, tied the two parts together, and escaped. How could he have done this?