Our Dreams Make Different Shapes by Dan Holloway

Author:Dan Holloway
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: memory, creativity, creative thinking, innovation, improve your memory
Publisher: Dan Holloway
Published: 2020-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

The Local Maximum

A second barrier to the adoption of creative ideas is the local maximum problem. Again, this is something we see all around us. And again, techniques and approaches that have become common practice bordering on orthodoxy only add to the problem.

Downclimbing the Dyno

By the time you finish this book, depending on the path you have used to navigate your way through, you will realise I love extreme sports. Not from any romanticised view of derring-do or search for an adrenaline binge but for the same reason I love art and film and mathematics and memory sports – because there is something beautiful in seeing how people tackle and solve incredibly hard problems.

One of my favourites is climbing. It’s also produced some of the best films and books you will ever find, and one of the best of those is The Dawn Wall, the remarkable account of Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson’s 2015 ascent of the route of the same name on Yosemite’s El Capitan.

The Dawn Wall is a 3000 foot route and their achievement is widely held to be the hardest free climb ever made (free climbing – as opposed to free solo, the ropeless technique brought to a wider audience by Alex Honnold in the Oscar-winning film of the same name – involves using ropes only to stop you falling. The actual climbing is done only by using your body to grip and pull on the rock).

The crux of the climb, the tiny fraction that nearly put paid to the whole venture, was a completely blank section of rock measuring just 8 feet. The only way to get past this section was to carry out a move called a “dyno”. That, in the simplest terms, is another name for hurling yourself off the rock completely and hoping you can land. In this case, the only thing to land on was a handhold a couple of inches across that protruded from the blank rock around it by a few millimetres.

Caldwell, who had first had the idea for the climb 7 years earlier, was so focused on this single problem that he had built a replica of the leap on the wall of his shed – accurate in every way except that it wasn’t over a thousand feet off the valley floor with winter (the climb took place in January to give them the best possible grip on the rock) winds howling around him as he practised. But by the time the actual climb came he had still never managed it.

And then he faced the move for real, after a week of the toughest climbing of his life. And it still seemed impossible. But then he took another look. And instead of looking at the minute details of every ripple on the rock, he zoomed out. And he realised there might be another way of getting past that apparently impassable 8 feet. He could go a hundred feet or more back down and climb back up in such a way that formed a loop.

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