The shortest distance between two points is never a straight line

The shortest distance between two points is never a straight line. It could be a spiral, a slow spiral around one point and then a loop into the other. Or a zig zagging path (I got this from my friend Tahir Shah who really introduced me to the whole idea of indirect paths to achieving something). The more I observed my own failures, setbacks, turnarounds, and successes, the more I saw there was NO correlation between directness of route and success, or rather, there was: a negative correlation. The direct approach was the more likely to either fail or take twice as long.

Twice as long- how often does an 'expert' estimate, be it for a building job or paint job, take twice as long? Or for computing work- say four times as long? And treble the price? The world of business prides itself on its direct approaches, its planning, its careful just-in-time delivery systems. These work- but at some hidden human cost. Look at the bored people working in Lidl. In the real world- meaning the one where we live with consequences rather than cleverly pass them on- we know that things kind of bumble or spurt forward and sometimes work and sometime fail and no one can ever quite be convincing about why one does and another doesn't.

As a child I was pretty direct. If I wanted something I went out and got it. No, even that isn't true. I wanted this girl to be my girlfriend but then a much higher status girl let it be known that she fancied me. I dropped the first girl straightaway. Traded up. The warped path to success.

I wanted to be a writer. Tried for years. Nine in fact. Then I gave up trying and spent all my time instead doing martial arts. That gave me the material for my first and, to date, most successful book. I went backwards to go forwards. Pretty much every book and article I've written hasn't been a 'straight shot'. Most of them involved doing something first, bunking off from writing. But I often have to con myself to do this. Tell myself I'm only taking a short time off from my 'vocation'. But then every time I do, I get great material. I turn away from writing and get better results. But I don't learn from this. My first novel was a direct shot at the target...at first. But then it got derailed, abandoned, picked up again and ultimately 'fixed' and published...seven years later. The slow way is the straight way.

But now I’m trying an experiment. I’ll report back on how it goes. Now I am deliberately, at long last, attempting the winding, looping, spiraling, zig-zagging path to any desired goal. If I want something I’m going to force myself first and foremost to think of the most convoluted way of going about it. Then I might do a slightly less indirect route. I will, for sure, stop worrying that time committed to something else is somehow time ‘uncommitted’ to writing. Writing is, after all, just a habit that sometimes pays off.

Is it possible to be more specific? Wouldn’t that be rather too direct? The English make a fetish of the opposite. Even orientals can sometimes find them too ‘oriental’. Though more and more I see directness is in the ascendant- when people are in a rush, or corralled by greed. I’ve been there myself many times. Holding doors open is not done out of politeness, it’s a stratagem for seeing what else might happen…

The charge of the Light Brigade was the result of a series of errors- astonishing directness, inescapable failure. Heroism is the triumph of courage over impossibility. Or an attempt at it.

Battles are often won by the indirect approach. Strategist Liddell Hart made much of this. And whilst it is true that Colonel H. Jones charged straight up a hill to get at the Argentines dug in during the Falklands war, there is a case that this rather insane head on attack was ‘indirect’, because, though it initially failed, his example spurred his men on to finally succeed.

Of course it is hard to really say. It always is. Which is yet more proof if you like that the shortest distance between two points is never via a straight line.

Straight lines are not to be found in nature. Look at the cracked mud of a field recently in the sun. The three and four junction vertices fork out like lightning, another non-straight phenomenon, very jagged in fact. Water is curved as it lies in a glass- surface tension. Trees branch, even very straight trees waver at the top. There are no poles growing. Straight things, slabs of fallen slate, are fragile and small in comparison with things that are not straight. Mountains. Gorges. Waterfalls.

We accept the convenience of a straight edge. It makes building easier- once you have straight planks from the B&Q. But if you start with trees then building is easier using bent and curved timber. Benders- by their very name- announce a curved kind of dwelling. I know someone who has happily lived in one for twenty years.

Look at bicycle tracks recorded on a muddy track- more mud- there is always a wobble, a sort of slow ‘S’. Bullets describe a trajectory- seen as a weakness- or a strength when it comes to the high parabola of the howitzer, getting inside an enemy’s defences. The lob, the serve, the free kick- all are immeasurably improved by exaggerating their natural curvature. He threw a curve ball- a sure sign of success.

I think we have to look at the motion of bees, flies, wasps, birds- pendant, undulatory, wavering, fast, undecided, iterative. I watched the birds massing on the south coast before beginning their long migration to Africa. They flew inland! Out of sight, then, in twos and threes they wheeled about, spiraling out further and further, gaining momentum or confidence over the sea it was hard to say. They travel with unerring inaccuracy- in the short term- but always arrive.

I walked in the Borneo jungle with jungle dwelling Lundaiya tribesmen. They loathed my compass, and laughed at it. We walked instead along ridges, always aiming to get higher, always on paths. We’d walk double the distance on a path rather than take a short cut. My guide told me: “a short cut is a way to a short life”.

Polymath: creativity teaching is the symptom, not the cure.

Teaching creativity is a relatively new thing. Brainstorming grew out of ad companies in the 1950s and lateral thinking was developed in the 1960s. What happened before then? Did Edison or Tesla see any need to teach creativity- or even impart their own ideas on the subject? Did Proust or Picasso? Was it that creativity was seen as the province of the genius or the artist or the inventor, a talent they had that no ordinary person could hope to understand?

I think the reverse. That a creative response was so normal that no one thought it needed isolating and encouraging…until corporations discovered that dominating the world with a few brands made more money than having lots of things appearing on a local scale, different and various the world over.

Reducing the work of a company to making lots of one thing- such as a Model T Ford, reduces the creativity required along the production process. No one working a till in Macdonalds is thinking how to improve a big mac.

But when you force conformity onto people they notice something is wrong. They feel constrained and underutilised. Being creative is a normal part of being human- whether it’s problem solving, improving, or coming up with new products. But strip that away and people hanker after a chance to be ‘creative’. They attend courses on being creative as a reaction to its disappearance rather than as a real method to become ‘more creative’. The ‘creativity’ movement is therefore a symptom rather than a cure.

Teaching creativity gets some results- at first. People learn to use what they know, combine it in new ways. Then they quickly run up against a problem. They don’t have wide range of knowledge to drawn upon.

It is not the depth of your knowledge that affects creativity, it is the width of the range. However that knowledge must be your ‘own’ in some sense. A mere passing acquaintance is not enough.

If you look at the background of 19^th century inventors and innovators and entrepreneurs it was polymathic. Many started by doing humble skilled labour and only gradually moved into more technologically advanced areas. They could almost all make things with their hands. Hiram Maxim and Thomas Edison were makers as much as thinkers.

Being able to make something is a special kind of knowledge- tacit knowledge in as much as it not just ‘content’, something written down. For ‘head people’, those who naturally take to content acquisition through reading, the act of learning how to make things, and getting better at it, provides much more powerful learning heuristics for any kind of future knowledge acquisition. It means you aren’t scared by the prospect of having to master a new field.

James Lovelock, the creator of the Gaia theory (who has just, aged 90+ published a fascinating autobiography ‘Homage to Gaia’), was also an independent scientist and inventor with many patents to his name. In a way he was a throwback to the 19th century model of the innovator. Instead of starting with a degree, he ended up at university after working for some years in a photographic lab. In the lab he became  skilled at manipulating chemicals and performing difficult chemical processes with great precision. When he finally studied chemistry at university he was accused of ‘cheating’, because the lecturer was so used to the sloppy efforts of unskilled undergraduates that he couldn’t believe in the perfect results, which Lovelock achieved. Lovelock was also able to make his own glassware and used a watchmaker’s lathe to turn small metal components he needed. This kind of skill allows one to visualise without hindrance all kinds of improvements. Though there are dress designers who cannot draw, there are none who cannot sew. Likewise it helps if you want to innovate in the physical world that you know how things are made- and making them is the only real way to learn. Yet making things is not on the curriculum unless you are ‘less able’.

But it is everyone who needs grounding in these skills. It is the mulch, the fertiliser, the fertile soil of real innovation in problem solving and product design and even creative writing. Making things provides new insights into how to learn. It breaks you out of the world of ‘content’. And when you make something, you own that knowledge.

You need a bedrock of material that is your own. In the movie Limitless the main character takes a drug that enables him to use everything he has ever learnt or ever seen. He’s seen kung-fu movies so when he’s in a fight he’s suddenly a kung-fu master. He’s able to piece together all that he’s heard about various companies and use that to make money on the stock market. It has a rather weak ending (and the dulling prospect of a TV series to follow) but the idea is good; wouldn’t it be nice to be able to use everything we know?

But the nub of it hinges on what we mean by ‘know’. If, as in the movie, it just means ‘having heard of it casually’ then obviously we don’t really ‘know’ it in any useful sense. If, however, we’ve made it ‘our own’ in some way or another then we can say we know it. Mathematician Geoffrey Chaitin makes the valid point that having read lots of proofs and learnt them is not the same as doing your own proof. His view is that by doing your own proof you own that bit of maths. I sat down the other day and worked out my own version of a proof for pythagorus’s theorem, one of the most basic tasks in maths, just to test this idea. It felt different, I had shifted from mere reading and consuming to really using some creative part of my brain. I firmly believe that maths should be taught using biographical and historical details about how each discovery came about and encouraging kids to emulate this- calculus as it evolved over time is a lot easier to make sense of (if you are not that mathematically inclined) than in the hyper arid and abstract version it appears in modern maths textbooks.

Back to Limitless- the movie was a pleasant fantasy in that it conflated what we are acquainted with, with what we know. Polymathics seeks to expand the zone of what we know to such a level that one becomes, in a sense, limitless. In the movie the character could focus and learn rapidly- these are both skills that polymathists have developed. In order to be polymathic you need to have some learning heuristics that make learning easy and predictable and rapid. Specialists are sometimes specialists out of a kind of pessimism- they are fearful that they can’t learn anything else fast enough or well enough. If you are confident that you can learn pretty much anything rapidly and easily then you are more likely to be adventurous and open to learning new things.

The wider the range of things you really know, the more ammunition you have when you need a creative solution. If you don’t have this background knowledge, all the brainstorming in the world will just turn up mediocre results.

It is my contention that valuable, but ultimately limited, results can be achieved by teaching people creative techniques. What we really need to teach is the desire to be polymathic. With a well stocked brain the real creativity will follow.

students get changing your identity to be more creative

A few days ago I gave a lecture to some students at Brookes University in Oxford. I was talking about being more polymathic as a way of becoming more creative. Being polymathic means having several areas of expertise you can dip into to get new ideas and solutions. But the start of being polymathic is very simple: change your self-image, change your identity.

Maybe because they were not yet set in their ways, I could sense I had made a point that went home. The room sort of opens out when everyone 'gets something'. All performers know this sensation (and the opposite, the feeling of being marooned at the wrong end of a telescope when you're 'dying' on stage). Anyway, they got the idea straightaway: think of yourself as a polymathist and not as a 'student', 'manager', 'scientist' and so on. This doesn't preclude being ANY of those things, after all being a manager doesn't mean you can't also be a husband, father or birdwatcher. What it DOES mean is that one should have other areas (which you might even keep quiet about) of expertise that you can draw on as a resource for new ideas, strategies, mental balance and happiness. But this doesn't mean be a generalist. It means have an active learning approach to these areas.

When you think of yourself as polymathic you suddenly have permission to be interested in everything. You are 'open', and that is the single best frame of mind to be in if you want to be creative.

the single easiest way to boost creativity

I meet whiners all the time who go on about their lack of creativity...and yet when a good idea comes up they are the first to be dismissive. They couldn't spot a good idea if it whacked them around the head with a wet kipper...and I always tell them the same thing. "I once knew someone who was so uncreative he was the living personification of uncreativity but he dreamed of working in TV, and sure enough by sheer hard work he got in and started working and hanging around creative people and after twenty years of that he came up with a string of hit TV programs- some of which have been exported all around the world. He became creative by learning to see good ideas when they came his way. People who lack creativity think the ideas are 'inside'. Wrong! They are all out there. Learn first to spot a good idea when someone else has one. Learn to spot the shape and dimensions and feel of a good idea- they're everywhere. Forget about what's inside your own head.

pirate efficiency v. robot efficiency

Uniform filing is boring and a too rigid system causes too many ambiguities; filing by date or subject is OK on a micro scale but that’s about it. Instead have a series of boxes and bags that are of varying importance to you. In the key bag you put everything you’d take if you had 30 seconds to leave, the next is if you have 30 minutes, then a day, then seven days, a month, a year, three years.

Things you use everyday in one box, things you use once a week in another, things you use once in a blue moon in another.

The boxes should all have character. Maybe like pirate sea chests or finely made cabinets; or maybe varying kinds of ammo box. The latest research into brain plasticity suggests the more senses we engage in any one action the more connections we grow in our brains. And if the brain isn't growing it's dying.

Being efficient doesn’t mean turning yourself into a bad robot. Being a good pirate is better.

squeezing the excluded middle

A basic rule of logic is that what isn't true is false and what isn't false is true. There is no in-between land. There is no 'middle'. Hence the 'law of the excluded middle' which states that things that aren't black are white and vice versa. Of course lots of people have opposed this and come up with various fuzzy and grey ways of having a 'not quite black or white' middle. The problem is these methods aren't as versatile or powerful, the 'middle' absorbs all the difficult to solve problems and there they sink as if in a marsh.

When you go with a system of black/white you create lots of nice paradoxes- one of the most common being the Cretan: All Cretans are liars, I am a Cretan (so I must be a liar, which means I'm not a Cretan etc).

But away from rigorous B+W systems there are varying degrees of 'middle' out there being used in explanations. The more you squeeze the middle, the more you emphasise contrast rather than varying shades, the more 'surprising' the results (ie. paradoxical) you can achieve. The more surprising the results the more attention you get.

It's been shown that 'experts' who are asked for their over view give more extreme answers than similar experts asked to provide varying scenarios and explanations of features. When you set a 'grey agenda' you tend to educate people in greyness. Which is a good thing. People start looking for subtle differences rather than gross and surprising ones. You evolve from an attention culture to a connoisseur culture.

surviving or thriving?

When you're surviving you have nothing good at days end except the not inconsiderable fact that you achieved your goals for the day. When you're thriving you have more to report as you took the time to cradle a few things and get a better look at them. Too much surviving and not enough thriving is bad for the brain, which needs feeding with new stuff, fiercely looked at and learned deeply.