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'Innovation In a Flash' Is a Myth
An anonymous reader writes "A New York Times article spells out what most of us probably already knew: real innovation takes lots of time and hard work to come to fruition. The article looks at the origins of new ideas, and attempts to dispel the myth that 'Eureka' moments create change. Comments author Scott Berkun, 'To focus on the magic moments is to miss the point. The goal isn't the magic moment: it's the end result of a useful innovation. Everything results from accretion. I didn't invent the English language. I have to use a language that someone else created in order to talk to you. So the process by which something is created is always incremental. It always involves using stuff that other people have made.'"
Which major IP holder sponsored the "research" behind the article?
Its just that most often, they come at the tail end of alot of hard work. Everything comes together in a flash, seemingly in one brilliant moment. Those moments are what many of us live for, but in truth, they really aren't the result of our brains exceeding physical and computational limits and suddenly operating at infinite clock-speed. The truth is you were probably working on the problem for some time (possibly unconsciously). Give yourself a little credit for having an efficient background scheduler.
/* MAGIC THEATRE
ENTRANCE NOT FOR EVERYBODY
MADMEN ONLY */
I suspect that this opinion is held by those people who would wish, for personal reasons, to seek to characterise originality and genius as a mixture of obsession and hard work. If they can convince themselves and others, then at some level they can think 'I could do all those things, but I have a life'. It's just comfort-zone area-denial for the self-deluded.
Intuition is pattern recognition and changing the lenses (angle) from which you look at something, that someone took the time to work out.
The key is, as Schopenhauer said: "to think something no one has thought yet, while looking at something that everybody see's" which is fancy way of saying: Keep changing the perspective (interpretive framework) and using other seemingly unrelated subjects to try and interpret it in terms of something else.
Millions of people have similar or the exact same leads on great ideas everyday but they don't have the time or the fast mind to follow up on them. IMHO it's not that people can't figure it out given enough time, it is who and what you come into contact with that triggers the lead up to deofuscate the idea and THEN the persistence to follow that 'intuition'. Intuition is necessary but intuition
Part of the problem is the education system itself amd it's attempt to rush learning and disavow thinking about things differently in order to pound out 'educated' workers. People that realize there are connections between everything that we can't see and have initiative despite lack of formal education were some of the greatest innovators.
So we are back to Bernard of Chartes and his wellknown and often quoted "If I've seen further, it was by standing on the shoulders of giants."
"Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration."
(Thomas Alva Edison)
"If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once
with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found
the object of his search. I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that
a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labour."
(Nikola Tesla, New York Times, October 19, 1931)
Did intelligence just take a nose-dive? Innovation results from accretion? The simple facts are that todays researchers/scientists simply specialize too much to gain the needed mental facility to achieve the "Eureka" moment. Once, long ago, people had to be knowledgeable in many diverse fields, and could mentally assemble innovative ideas, whereas today people focus on a single discipline, and almost never see a bigger picture. We've also forgotten how to daydream - an important ability in the creative process. It's sad. I myself am a student of multiple disciplines, master of none. Over the 44 years of my life thus far I have independantly conceived of several new devices, as well as alternative methods to transmit data, etc. I lack the desire to learn to network with others (I won't play that game, and so stay true to myself). I also lack any financial resources to see these innovations through to fruition. Because of these personal limitations, my ideas and inventions have either remained in my head or as notes scribbled on paper, while sometimes years later someone else has been able to successfully bring them to market. So keep trying to convince yourself that there are no true "Eureka" moments. There most certainly are.
For myself, as an engineer, I would have to say that most "creation" is a combination of both hard work and a series of sometimes small and occasionally large scale eureka moments.
I like the term "grok" coined by Heinlein as a verb meaning "to comprehend a topic or concept completely". Sometimes it is very difficult to completely grok something in the problem domain you are working in. If you are at the frontier of human knowledge (in whatever endeavor that may be... science, engineering, theology, politics, art, etc.) it is very unlikely that there is anybody who completely understands some new theory or concept... which is where the intellectual "fun" of being a genuine scientist tends to be at.
I remember for myself when I was trying to work on a bit of multiplexor code for an MPEG video stream engine (it was actually stuff for DVD-Video, so a bit more complex still), I finally hit upon a eureka moment when I finally figured out how to put everything together and write a small bit of very elegant software to solve the problem. Much of this involved reading and pondering through the specifications and trying to understand the problem domain, and I did write some test code to try a few ideas out. But in the end I scrapped all of the old code and with a "clean sheet" started the whole process all over again from scratch with the core part of the software only being written in about 10 minutes. It took me about 4 months to get there, and to an outside observer (such as one of the investors of the company I was working for) it would appear as though I was just wasting time and money to get to that point. The only productivity for actual code written was in that 10 minutes after I finally got the whole concept down. A co-worker wrote a similar bit of software that was insanely buggy but kluged through in just six weeks (instead of 4 months... a concurrent effort here), but then again it was a never ending process of trying to fix one problem after another in that klugged code. My software didn't have to be touched again when I was through, and was incredibly easy to review for bugs as well (like I said... it only took about 10 minutes to write once I got the concept down).
I could give countless other examples ranging from simple to very complex problems, and I'll say from experience that such moments do happen. But it also takes a whole bunch of preparation that often goes unnoticed, and can tie together completely unrelated fields of knowledge. In the example of the multiplexor above, my "eureka moment" came while I was doing an engine repair in a ten year old car with a bad water pump. I was able to take that thought process of automotive repair and apply it to software development and a 400 page piece of very dry specification language.
Another analogy is watching a beaker of super-saturated chemical solution suddenly "precipitate" leaving a bunch of stuff at the bottom of the beaker. It may take some considerable preparation to get to that point, but once there, the "action" happens very quickly. The human mind often works in a very similar fashion with regards to "discovering" a new truth about the universe. For those who have never experienced something like this happen in their life, you are genuinely missing out on an experience that IMHO is better than sex.