Name: How to Fly a Horse
Rating: 4.1 (16 reviews)
Author: Kevin Ashton

What’s in it for me? Discover how to unleash your natural urge to create.

Have you ever stood in awe beside a Picasso or a Rodin and thought, I wish I had that creative talent? Ever witnessed the latest tech whiz kid make a billion and think, why can’t I innovate like that?

Such thinking is common in our society and it highlights a common fallacy: that creativity is the result of individual genius. Few have it, and most of us don’t.

These blinks will show you how this mind-set is completely wrong. They show that creativity is a relatively simple process that we all have the ability to carry out. Read these blinks and you will discover how you can become a creative genius in whatever you choose to do.

In these blinks you’ll discover

why every creator stands on the shoulders of giants;
how a 12-year-old slave revolutionized the vanilla industry; and
how Steve Jobs designed the iPhone, step by step.

Creativity isn’t the result of genius, but of the ordinary process of thinking about how to overcome a problem.

How many times have you heard that Mozart was a genius, composing complete symphonies in his head before putting them to paper? Or that great inventors were somehow radically different from the rest of us?

These are myths, plain and simple. In fact, no creator is fundamentally different from you or me.

The creativity myth preaches that few are chosen for creative greatness, and that their success relies on magical flashes of genius insight.

But if you actually look at the life of any genius, it’s not superiority and spontaneous inspiration that will highlight their success, but careful thinking.

Take Archimedes, the person who first cried out “Eureka!”, and who is credited with discovering the properties of density. When taking a bath, he noticed that the water rose and fell again as he entered and exited the tub. In short, Archimedes realized that water displacement could be used to measure volume.

But he didn’t immediately relate this finding to density. Rather, it came after a long period of thinking about the problem and trying to develop solutions for it.

In fact, the act of creating itself is little more than simply thinking about how to solve a problem – something we all do.

Many experiments have demonstrated this to be true, such as psychologist Karl Duncker’s Box Experiment. In the experiment, Duncker asked subjects to attach a candle to a wooden door using only the candle, a book of matches and a box of tacks. He discovered that there are three solutions – melting wax to fix the candle, tacking the candle to the door, and finally, emptying the box of tacks, tacking it to the door and placing the candle inside – and that the processes of arriving at these solutions were the same for each person who attempted them.

For example, everybody who thought of tacking the box of tacks to the door went through the same thought process: eliminating other ideas, thinking about building a platform with the tacks and then considering using the box as a platform.

Creation consists of taking gradual steps rather than leaping into the unknown.

The first telephones were miles away from modern-day smartphones. But the transformation didn’t happen overnight. Rather, it came in baby steps.

Indeed, creation comes from taking these small steps, not giant leaps. It is the result of asking minor questions, finding the solutions and then discovering new questions.

Creation is nothing without work and failure.

Don’t expect the cure for cancer or an artistic masterpiece to just fall from the sky and land in your lap. Like all great creators, we need to work and accept failure before we can produce anything good.

Creation without work is a concept that is at odds with reality. If you want the results, you’ll have to put in the hours to achieve them. Doing so requires complete commitment and the ability to say “no” to distractions.

Key ideas in How to Fly a Horse

What is How to Fly a Horse about?

How to Fly a Horse (2015) delves into the process of creation and ultimately discovers that the very act itself is far more ordinary than we often think. In fact, in building upon the creative work of generations of thinkers, anyone can create, as long as they have the grit and determination to do so.