How to Fly a Horse

by Kevin Ashton

  And their rejection was fierce. At best, Folkman’s talks were met with apathy. At worst, audiences walked out when it was his turn to speak, leaving him facing an empty room. A member of one grant committee wrote that he was “working on dirt.” Another said he was on “a hopeless search.” A professor at Yale called him “a charlatan.” Researchers were advised not to join his lab. Members of the board of Boston Children’s Hospital, where he had been surgeon in chief, worried that Folkman was damaging their hospital’s reputation. They cut his salary in half and forced him to quit performing surgery. One day in 1981, he repaired the deformed throat of a newborn baby girl, scrubbed out, and was never allowed to operate again.

  The attacks from outside Folkman’s lab were matched by disappointments within it. Trying to prove his hypothesis meant monotonous experiments, most of which were unsuccessful. He put a sign on his wall excusing his lack of progress. It said: “Innovation is a series of repetitive failures.”

  One Saturday in November 1985, Folkman’s researcher Donald Ingber found fungus contaminating one of his experiments. This is not uncommon in laboratories. Scientists follow a strict protocol: they throw contaminated experiments away. Ingber did not do this. He examined the blood vessels growing in the petri dish. The fungus was forcing them to retreat.

  Ingber and Folkman experimented with the fungus, watching as it blocked the growth of blood vessels in culture dishes, then chicken embryos, then mice.

  Enter Jennifer. Folkman tried to exorcise her tumor to prove his crackpot theory of angiogenesis. As Jennifer twisted and screamed under the torture of Folkman’s “treatment,” her family came to realize why Folkman could not get published, funded, or perform surgery. It was the same reason other scientists called him a crazy charlatan on a hopeless search, walked out of his talks, said he was working on dirt, and told researchers to avoid him.

  The reason was that his idea was new.

  After the first few weeks of agonizing treatment, Jennifer’s fevers cooled. Her hallucinations passed. The lump in her head shrank away until it left her forever. Her jaw grew back. She was a pretty little girl again. Judah Folkman had saved her life.

  2 | FAIL

  There are no shortcuts to creation. The path is one of many steps, neither straight nor winding but in the shape of a maze.

  Judah Folkman walked the maze. It is easy to enter and difficult to stay.

  Creation is not a moment of inspiration but a lifetime of endurance. The drawers of the world are full of things begun. Unfinished sketches, pieces of invention, incomplete product ideas, notebooks with half-formulated hypotheses, abandoned patents, partial manuscripts. Creating is more monotony than adventure. It is early mornings and late nights: long hours doing work that will likely fail or be deleted or erased—a process without progress that must be repeated daily for years. 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. The most important thing creators do is work. The most important thing they don’t do is quit.

  The only way to be productive is to produce when the product is bad. Bad is the path to good. Until he saved Jennifer’s life, Folkman described his work as “a series of repetitive failures.” Those failures did not come easily. There were gory experiments with rabbit eyes, chicken embryos, and puppy intestines. Some ideas needed vast quantities of cow cartilage, others gallons of mouse urine. Many experiments had to be repeated many times. Some went wrong and were thrown away. Some went right but yielded unhelpful results. Much of the work took nights and weekends. Long periods of effort produced nothing. Folkman once wondered about the difference between futility and tenacity and came to a conclusion that became his mantra: “If your idea succeeds, everybody says you’re persistent. If it doesn’t succeed, you’re stubborn.”

  Folkman saved more lives after Jennifer’s. Angiogenesis became an important theory in the treatment of cancer. Doctors and scientists regarded Folkman as more than persistent—he was lauded as a genius. But he received that distinction only after he proved his hypothesis. Surely either he had been a genius all along or he was no genius at all?

  Donald Ingber’s fungus was not the miraculous coincidence it might seem to be. Endurance often finds fortune. Folkman and his team worked for years to discover ways to culture blood vessels, to test for blocking agents, and to understand the nature of tumor growth. Ingber was a brilliant scientist, working on a Saturday, prepared for chance. In any other lab, the fungus would have been thrown out. In other labs, doing different research, it almost certainly already had been. That event was a culmination, not a revelation. Luck favors work.

  We enter creation’s maze with problems at every turn. Folkman’s beginning, working alone in a badly lit lab barely bigger than a tollbooth, was not auspicious. Neither were his first experiments. He started with more questions than answers. We will, too. Some we ask ourselves. Some are asked by others. We will not know the answers or even how to find them. Creation demands belief beyond reason. Our foothold is faith—in ourselves, in our dream, in our odds of success, and in the cumulative, compound, creative power of work. Folkman had no reason to know he was right and countless reasons to believe he was wrong—many of them provided by his peers. He continued because of faith.

  Faith is how we face failure. Not faith in a higher power—although we may choose that, too—but faith that there is a way forward. Creators redefine failure. Failure is not final. It carries no judgment and yields no conclusions. The word comes from the Latin fallere, to deceive. Failure is deceit. It aims to defeat us. We must not be fooled. Failure is lesson, not loss; it is gain, not shame. A journey of a thousand miles ends with a single step. Is every other step a failure?

  Stephen Wolfram, scientist, author, and entrepreneur, is best known for his geeky software program Mathematica. In addition to writing books and code, he obsessively gathers information about his life. He has amassed what he says is “one of the world’s largest collections of personal data.” He knows how many e-mails he has sent since 1989, how many meetings he has had since 2000, how many phone calls he has made since 2003, and how many steps he has taken since 2010. He knows these things precisely. Since 2002 he has logged every key he has ever pressed on his computer’s keyboard. He made over one hundred million keystrokes in the ten years between 2002 and 2012 and was surprised to find that the key he pressed most often was Delete. He had used it more than seven million times: he erased seven out of every hundred characters he typed, a year and a half of writing, then deleting.

  Wolfram’s measurement includes around two hundred thousand e-mails. He found he deleted most often when he was writing for publication. This is true for professional writers, too. Stephen King, for example, has published more than eighty books, most of them fiction. He says he writes two thousand words a day. Between the beginning of 1980 and the end of 1999, he published thirty-nine new books, totaling more than five million words. But writing two thousand words a day for twenty years yields fourteen million words: King must erase almost two words for every one he keeps. He says, “That DELETE key is on your machine for a good reason.”

  Where do Stephen King’s deleted words go? They are not all lost to rephrasing. One of King’s most popular books is a novel called The Stand, published in 1978. The finished manuscript, submitted after he had made all his deletions, was, he says, “twelve hundred pages long and weighed twelve pounds, the same weight as the sort of bowling ball I favor.”

  His publishers were worried that such a long book would not sell, so King made more deletions: three hundred pages’ worth. But his most telling revelation is that he might never have traveled that far: around the halfway point in the writing, after more than five hundred single-spaced pages, King got stuck: “If I’d had two or even three hundred pages I would have abandoned The Stand and gone on to something else—God knows I had done it be
fore. But five hundred pages was too great an investment, both in time and in creative energy.”

  King will throw away three hundred single-spaced typewritten pages, about sixty thousand words, which will have taken him more than a month to write, if he feels they are not good enough.

  Success is the culmination of many failures. When James Dyson, an inventor, finds a problem, he immediately builds something that does not solve it, an approach he calls “make, break, make, break.” What the world calls a failure the engineer calls a prototype. From Dyson’s website:

  There’s a misconception that invention is about having a great idea, tinkering with it in the tool shed for a few days, then appearing with the finished design. In fact, it’s usually a far longer and iterative process—trying something over and over, changing one small variable at a time. Trial and error.

  Dyson describes himself as “just an ordinary person. I get angry about things that don’t work.” The thing that made him so angry it changed his life was a vacuum cleaner that lost suction as its bag filled. He was thinking about it as he drove past a factory with a dust extractor that works based on a principal called “cyclonic separation.” Cyclonic separators, or cyclones, spin air in a spiral and move anything else—like dust and dirt—around until it eventually drops down. This is is how Dorothy got to Oz:

  The north and south winds met where the house stood, and made it the exact center of the cyclone. In the middle of a cyclone the air is generally still, but the great pressure of the wind on every side of the house raised it up higher and higher, until it was at the very top of the cyclone. The little girl gave a cry of amazement and looked about her. The cyclone had set the house down very gently—for a cyclone—in the midst of a country of marvelous beauty.

  The beauty of dust extraction by cyclone is simple: there is no filter to clog, which means nothing reduces the suction. Filters were the reason most vacuum cleaners sucked—or, rather, did not. Dyson’s idea was equally simple: make a vacuum cleaner that used a cyclone instead of sucking dust and air through a filter.

  Cyclone math is not simple—it combines fluid mechanics to describe the movement of air with particle transport equations to predict the behavior of dust. Dyson did not waste much time on this math. Like the Wright brothers, he made an observation, then went straight to making. And the first thing he made—out of cardboard and a disassembled vacuum cleaner—did not work. Neither did the second, third, or fourth.

  Dyson faced many problems. He had to make the world’s smallest cyclone. It had to be capable of extracting house dust particles about a millionth of a meter wide. And he had to make it suitable for home use and mass production.

  It took more than five thousand prototypes, constructed over five years, to create a working cyclone-based vacuum cleaner. He says, “I’m a huge failure because I made 5,126 mistakes.” And, on another occasion:

  I wanted to give up almost every day. A lot of people give up when the world seems to be against them, but that’s the point when you should push a little harder. I use the analogy of running a race. It seems as though you can’t carry on, but if you just get through the pain barrier, you’ll see the end and be okay. Often, just around the corner is where the solution will happen.

  Dyson’s solution was—eventually—a working cyclone-based vacuum cleaner that created a multibillion-dollar business and a personal fortune of more than $5 billion.

  Judah Folkman’s observation that “innovation is a series of repetitive failures” applies to every field of creation and every creator. Nothing good is created the first time. The step-by-step approach to problem solving Karl Duncker observed does not apply only to forward movements like Kandinsky’s sketches. Some steps go backward. But persistence turns everything into progress. Writer Linda Rubright’s definition of “Iterative Process” is “Total fail. Repeat.” Creators must be willing to fail and repeat until they find the step that arrives. Samuel Beckett said it best: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

  3 | STRANGERS WITH CANDY

  Failure is not wasteful but useful. Time spent failing is time spent well. Wandering creation’s maze is never a waste of time. Only leaving it is.

  A Hungarian psychology professor once wrote to famous creators, asking them to be interviewed for a book he was writing. One of the most interesting things about his project was how many people said no.

  Management writer Peter Drucker: “One of the secrets of productivity (in which I believe whereas I do not believe in creativity) is to have a VERY BIG waste paper basket to take care of ALL invitations such as yours—productivity in my experience consists of NOT doing anything that helps the work of other people but to spend all one’s time on the work the Good Lord has fitted one to do, and to do well.”

  Secretary to novelist Saul Bellow: “Mr. Bellow informed me that he remains creative in the second half of life, at least in part, because he does not allow himself to be a part of other people’s ‘studies.’ ”

  Photographer Richard Avedon: “Sorry—too little time left.”

  Secretary to composer György Ligeti: “He is creative and, because of this, totally overworked. Therefore, the very reason you wish to study his creative process is also the reason why he (unfortunately) does not have time to help you in this study. He would also like to add that he cannot answer your letter personally because he is trying desperately to finish a Violin Concerto which will be premiered in the Fall.”

  The professor contacted 275 creative people. A third of them said no. Their reason was lack of time. A third said nothing. We can assume their reason for not even saying no was also lack of time and possibly lack of a secretary.

  Time is the raw material of creation. Wipe away the magic and myth of creating and all that remains is work: the work of becoming expert through study and practice, the work of finding solutions to problems and then problems with those solutions, the work of trial and error, the work of thinking and perfecting, the work of creating. Creating consumes. It is all day, every day. It knows neither weekends nor vacations. It is not when we feel like it. It is habit, compulsion, obsession, and vocation. The common thread that links creators is how they spend their time. No matter what you read, no matter what they claim, nearly all creators spend nearly all their time on the work of creation. There are few overnight successes and many up-all-night successes.

  Saying no has more creative power than ideas, insights, and talent combined. Saying no guards time, the thread from which we weave our creations. The math of time is simple: you have less than you think and need more than you know.

  We are not taught to say no. We are taught not to say no. No is rude. No is a rebuff, a rebuttal, a minor act of verbal violence. No is for drugs and strangers with candy.

  But consider the Hungarian professor: famous, distinguished, politely and personally requesting a small amount of time from people who had already found creative success. And two-thirds of them declined, in most cases saying nothing or having someone else say no for them, wasting not even a minute to reply.

  Creators do not ask how much time something takes but how much creation it costs. This interview, this letter, this trip to the movies, this dinner with friends, this party, this last day of summer. How much less will I create unless I say no? A sketch? A stanza? A paragraph? An experiment? Twenty lines of code? The answer is always the same: yes makes less. We do not have enough time as it is. There are groceries to buy, gas tanks to fill, families to love, and day jobs to do.

  People who create know this. They know the world is all strangers with candy. They know how to say no, and they know how to suffer the consequences. Charles Dickens, rejecting an invitation from a friend:

  “It is only half an hour”—“It is only an afternoon”—“It is only an evening,” people say to me over and over again; but they don’t know that it is impossible to command one’s self sometimes to any stipulated and set disposal of five minutes—or that the mere consciousness of an engagement will sometime worry a who
le day. Who ever is devoted to an art must be content to deliver himself wholly up to it, and to find his recompense in it. I am grieved if you suspect me of not wanting to see you, but I can’t help it; I must go in my way whether or no.

  No makes us aloof, boring, impolite, unfriendly, selfish, antisocial, uncaring, lonely, and an arsenal of other insults. But no is the button that keeps us on.

  4 | NOW WASH YOUR HANDS

  Failure is often followed by rejection.

  In 1846, large numbers of women and babies were dying during childbirth in Vienna. The cause of death was puerperal fever, a disease that swells then kills its victims. Vienna’s General Hospital had two maternity clinics. Mothers and newborns were dying in only one of them. Pregnant women waited outside the hospital, begging not to be taken to the deadly clinic, often giving birth in the street if they were refused. More women and babies survived labor in the street than in the clinic. All the deaths came at the hands of doctors. In the other clinic, midwives delivered the babies.

  Vienna General was a teaching hospital where doctors learned their trade by cutting up cadavers. They often delivered babies after dissecting corpses. One of the doctors, a Hungarian named Ignaz Semmelweis, started to wonder if the puerperal fever was somehow being carried from the corpses to the women in labor. Most of his peers thought the question preposterous. Carl Edvard Marius Levy, a Danish obstetrician, for instance, wrote that Semmelweis’s “beliefs are too unclear, his observations too volatile, his experiences too uncertain, for the deduction of scientific results.” Levy was offended by the lack of theory behind Semmelweis’s work. Semmelweis speculated that some kind of organic matter was being transferred from the morgue to the mothers, but he did not know what it was. Levy said this made the whole idea unsatisfactory from a “scientific point of view.”