How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention, and Discovery

The title of the first chapter is its main idea. Rather than creating being something special and rare, the author argues that it is innate and common to everyone. He reviews the history of assigning credit for inventions and ideas, concluding that it was not widespread until the late 14th century. The US did not begin granting patents until 1790. One researcher has estimated that between then and 2011, six million different people received a patent, and the rate has clearly increased over time. This is Ashton’s proof that “Creating is not for an elite few. It is not even close to being for an elite few” (9).

On the contrary, creation is everywhere; it’s so ubiquitous, we don’t even notice it. The idea that only a select few geniuses can create originated in the Renaissance and continued until the 20th century. At that time, advances in studies of the brain showed that creating is a series of behaviors much like solving problems. Allen Newell was one of the first to promote this idea, and Robert Weisberg continued it. The latter contended that “creative thinking” is no different from regular thinking—it just has a creative outcome.

As evidence of this, Ashton cites failed studies that sought a correlation between intelligence and creativity. If the latter requires genius, then people identified by intelligence tests as most intelligent ought to be the most creative. Time and again, attempts by researchers to show this failed. Instead, creativity stems from the same path for everyone: a step-by-step process involving a lot of hard work. 

Ashton goes a step further in Chapter 2 by asserting that not only is creating the same as ordinary thinking, but thinking is like walking: everyone does it in the same way. He traces this back to an academic named Otto Selz in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, whose ideas bore fruit in America via researchers Karl Duncker and David Krech. Duncker published his book On Problem Solving in 1935, which showed how innovative solutions required step-by-step thinking rather than a flash of insight.

To test this, Duncker had given high school students a number of problems to solve. The most famous is known as the “Candle Problem” or the “Box Problem.” Students had to figure out how to attach a candle to a wooden door so that it burns normally if all they had was a candle, some tacks, and a box of matches. The solution lies in thinking about the box of matches in a way that is different from its intended use: empty the box, tack it to the door, and stand the candle up in it. The fact that most people don’t figure this out shows that “old ideas obstruct new ones” (32). Later studies with the same problem had the subjects say their thought process out loud, and they all worked the same way, moving in small steps from the known to the new.

Duncker claimed that creating started with one of two question: “‘Why doesn’t it work?’ or, ‘What should I change to make it work?’” (44). Sometimes it’s not obvious that something is not working, and Ashton cautions against complacency. This, he says, was the brilliance of Steve Jobs of Apple Computers: He was never satisfied and constantly tried to improve upon products that appeared to be successful. Some think that having a really good idea to begin with makes Duncker’s questions moot, but Ashton argues that an idea is different from creation because the latter is the result of action. A famous example is the Wright brothers. Many people thought of human flight before they did, but only they were able to work through the solution step by step to successfully make it happen: That’s creation.