Nikola Tesla: Imagination and the Man That Invented the 20th Century by Patrick Sean

Author:Patrick, Sean [Patrick, Sean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oculus Publishers
Published: 2013-04-09T07:00:00+00:00

The Secret to Creativity

Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone. Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Bell’s telephone. Pythagoras’ theorem.

How did they come up with such unique, profound ideas? Well, there’s an answer, and it’s probably not what you think.

Steve Jobs said creativity is “just connecting things.”

Salvador Dali said “those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.”

Picasso said “good artists copy but great artists steal.”

Mark Twain said “all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources.”

No magnificent product of the imagination—whether a machine, painting, or philosophy—was created in a complete vacuum. The invention of the telegraph took the efforts of a thousand, but the last man, who added that final inspired touch, got the credit.

When you start viewing creativity as a process of combination, and imagination as the ability to connect, stretch, and merge things in new ways, creative brilliance becomes less mystifying. A creative genius is just better at connecting the dots than others are.

That’s why the coffee house in the Age of Enlightenment and the Parisian salons of modernism were such engines of creativity; they were spaces where many people from many different backgrounds and areas of expertise came to swap, join, and borrow many different ideas.

Don’t confuse creativity and imagination with “thinking” either. Ray Bradbury said that thinking is the enemy of creativity because it’s self-conscious. When you think you sit calmly and try to reason through something in a structured, logical way. Creativity dances to a different tune. Once you flip that switch, things get a bit chaotic. Ideas start buzzing. Images start popping into your head. Fragments of all kinds of data find their way into orbit. We’re pulled in one direction, then suddenly our instincts send us flying in another. Material collides and fuses, disappears and reappears. This chaos is essential to the creative process. A breakthrough occurs when pieces happen to come together in unique and harmonic ways.

“Our first endeavors are purely instinctive prompting of an imagination vivid and undisciplined,” Tesla wrote. “As we grow older reason asserts itself and we become more and more systematic and designing. But those early impulses, though not immediately productive, are of the greatest moment and may shape our very destinies.”

There’s a catch to “combinatorial creativity,” though. Before you can connect dots, you need to have dots to connect. The more material you’re exposed to in the world, the more grist you’ll have for your imagination mill. Tesla fully immersed himself in the world of electricity. He read hundreds of books. He conducted thousands of experiments and took copious notes. The more varied your knowledge and experiences are, the more likely you are to be able to create new associations and fresh ideas.

Your mind has an incredible ability to cross-pollinate—that is, to connect disparate things to solve problems in unique ways or envision new creations. Einstein attributed many of his physics breakthroughs to his violin breaks, which he believed helped him connect ideas in very different ways.

This brings us back to the beginning of the genius code: curiosity.

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