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CONTENTS Introduction: Why One Plus One Equals Three Part One
Regret is Worse Than Embarrassment
Part Two
Choice Architecture
Part Three The Spirit of the Law, Not the Letter of the Law Part Four
The Message is the Medium
Part Five
Disaster is a Gift
Part Six
The Value of Ignorance
Part Seven Question the Question Part Eight
Belief Trumps Fact
Part Nine
Creativity is Messy
Acknowledgements
INTRODUCTION: WHY ONE PLUS ONE EQUALS THREE A few years ago I read an interview with Steve Jobs. Steve said any new idea is nothing more than a new combination of old elements. He said the ability to make those new combinations depends on our ability to see relationships. That’s what makes some people more creative. They are better at spotting those connections, better at recognizing possible relationships. They are able to do this because they’ve had more experiences, or thought more about those experiences, than other people. They are better at connecting the dots because they have more dots to connect. Steve said that this was the problem in the ‘creative’ industries. Most people haven’t had diverse experiences. They may know a lot, but only about a very narrow field. So they don’t have enough dots to connect. And so they end up with predictable, linear solutions. One of the best advertising people ever was Carl Ally. He said the true creative person wants to be a know-it-all. They want to know about all kinds of things: ancient history, nineteenthcentury mathematics, modern manufacturing techniques, flower arranging, and lean hog futures.
Because they never know when these ideas might come together to form a new idea. It may happen six minutes later or six years down the road, but they know it will happen. That’s been part of my purpose in this book. The more varied the input, the more unexpected the combinations, the more creative the ideas. As Steve Jobs said: the broader our understanding of human experience, the more dots we will have to connect, the more creative our ideas will be. Similarly, years ago I read a book by an Indian mathematics professor. She wrote that it’s possible to greatly increase the amount of brain we use. But not in the conventional way. In fact, in exactly the opposite way. The secret again is connections. Conventionally, people just learn more stuff. They learn more stuff about whatever they’re interested in. She said this kind of learning made for small, slow growth in brain usage. Because we are simply adding to the store of what we already know. But if new ideas are new combinations of existing ideas, the more connections we can create, the more ideas we can generate. That’s why the professor said, for real growth, we need to identify the areas we’re not naturally interested in. Then we need to investigate those areas. This massively multiplies the amount of new connections we can make with our existing store of knowledge. Because it’s no longer predictable, now it’s original and surprising. Because each connection will be a new connection with everything else we know. So our creativity is directly related to how many connections we are able to
make. Which is directly related to how much new and unusual stuff we expose our minds to. Which is the point of this book. Under the old system 1 + 1 = 2 Under the new system 1 + 1 = 3
PART ONE
REGRET IS WORSE THAN EMBARRASSMENT
WHAT EXISTS BEATS WHAT DOESN’T
In 1988, Nicholas Winton’s wife was going through their attic. She came across a scrapbook. In it were hundreds and hundreds of names and addresses. She’d never seen them before. She asked her husband what they were. Then he told her this story. In 1938, Nicholas Winton was going skiing in Switzerland. When Kristallnacht happened. In a night of violence