“Anything truly novel is invented only during one’s youth”

This summer I read Walter Isaacson’s illuminating biography of Albert Einstein, the man who is widely considered to be the greatest thinker of the 20th Century. In 1905, when he was only 26 years old, he published four groundbreaking papers that forever changed the way people understood space, time, mass, gravity and energy.

By the time Einstein turned 40 in 1919, at a moment when he was struggling to devise a unified theory of matter, he complained to a friend that “Anything truly novel is invented only during one’s youth. Later, one becomes more experienced, more famous – and more blockheaded“.

Einstein’s frustration at his diminished capabilities as he aged is a phenomenon that is considered common with mathematicians and physicists who seem to make their greatest contributions to science before they turn 40. Einstein remarked to a colleague that as he got older he felt his intellect slowly becoming crippled and calcified.

Why does this happen? In Einstein’s case, it was partly because his early successes had come from his rebellious traits. In his youth, there was a link between his creativity and his willingness to defy authority and the universally accepted cosmological laws of his day. He had no sentimental attachment to the old order and was energized at the chance to show that the accepted knowledge was wrong or incomplete. His stubbornness worked to his advantage.

After he turned 40, his youthful rebellious attitudes were softened by the comforts of fame, renown, riches and a comfortable home. He became wedded to the faith of preserving the certainties and determinism of classical science – leading him to reject the uncertainties inherent in the next great scientific breakthrough, quantum mechanics. His stubbornness began working to his disadvantage as he got older.

It was a fate that Einstein began fearing years before it happened. He wrote after finishing his most groundbreaking papers: “Soon I will reach the age of stagnation and sterility when one laments the revolutionary spirit of the young“. In one of his most revealing statements about himself, Einstein complained: “To punish me for my contempt of authority, Fate has made me an authority myself“. He found it even harder as he got older acknowledging “the increasing difficulty a man past fifty always has adapting to new thoughts”.

Einstein brilliance is beyond compare, but I can relate to his observation about doing your best work when you are young. When I look back at my personal life and work career, I recognize that I was at my most ambitious and innovative during the decades of my 20’s and 30’s.

My adult life exploded with big events in 1982, the year that I turned 22. In the timespan of that one year I managed to graduate from college, marry my college sweetheart, start my first professional job as an engineer, buy a new house and a new car, and learn that my wife and I were going to become first-time parents. I remember filling out a survey designed to measure the amount of stress in your life during that eventful year and being surprised when the calculated stress numbers registered so high that they indicated I should be dead!

But all of it was exhilarating to me at that point in my life. I was experiencing new things and accumulating knowledge like a sponge. I knew that my growing family would be counting on me to be a good provider – which gave me the incentive I needed to focus on building a stable career.

I was determined to be successful in my engineering role and threw myself into learning everything I possibly could about the company I worked for as well as the electronic test and measurement equipment that they manufactured.

Many of my co-workers had graduated from more prestigious universities than me and I felt that I had something to prove. I wanted to make a name for myself and grow my reputation and value within the company by making important contributions to the projects to which I was assigned.

I took several continuing education engineering classes at night to improve my knowledge of subject areas that I knew would be helpful to me at work, I sought out brilliant co-workers who could mentor me and give me wise advice on how to approach complex technical projects, and I questioned everything – wondering if there might be a better solution to the problems we were trying to solve.

This drive in my early career to be successful enabled me to do my most innovative and important work for the company during the decades of my 20’s and 30’s. In the span of my first 18 years working for the company, I was awarded two patents, helped develop multiple new test products which generated millions of dollars for the company, created automated software regression tests significantly lowering product development times while improving software quality, and published frequent technical articles for industry conferences and trade journals.

By the time I turned 40, I could point to many important career milestones and had achieved recognition as a top performer and leader within the company. The rewards of my hard work were a comfortable home and financial independence. With this success I began to have feelings of contentment that lessened my drive to take on new projects or solve interesting problems. I became comfortable and happy with life as it was – I no longer felt the need to over-extend myself.

I was satisfied to rest on my past achievements and to take on less tasking roles that would improve the product in evolutionary, rather than revolutionary ways. Over time, I became the wise, experienced, older mentor to younger employees who came to me for advice and direction.

I felt okay with that transition as I considered it my good fortune to be in a situation where I was able to share my knowledge with a new generation of ambitious young people who were ready to make their own marks on the world by inventing novel new solutions that were now beyond me. In some ways, being a part of those collaborative efforts made me feel better than my individual personal accomplishments.

The famous journalist Ed Bradley once interviewed Bob Dylan in 1998 on the television show 60 minutes, at a time when he was approaching 60 years old. During the course of the interview, Bradley asked Bob what the source of inspiration was for his famous early songs, the ones that led to him being recognized as the voice of a generation while he was still only in his 20’s.

Dylan replied that his early songs were almost magically written and that he felt some kind of power, outside of himself, flowing through him while was writing them. When Bradley asked if he could still tap into that penetrating magic now in his songwriting, Dylan paused and said; “No, I don’t know how I got to write those songs“. Bradley followed up and asked if that disappointed him, Dylan replied softly; “Well you can’t do something forever and I did it once… and I can do other things now – but I can’t do that“.

That is a healthy way, I believe, of thinking about what is possible for each of us as we age. My days of endless ambition and innovative thinking are past. But I can do other things now that I couldn’t do then. I can indulge hobbies that interest me, I can find new paths to hike and rivers to fish, I can help care for my mother in her old age and I can share what I have learned through my life experiences and pass it on to my grandchildren and the larger community via this blog.

There will only ever be one Einstein, none of us will ever be as brilliant as him – but if you are under 40, get busy by putting your spry young mind and youthful ambition to work! Maybe you too can come up with novel ideas and ways of doing things that will help change the world or someone’s life for the better.

And if you are over 40, you can be like Einstein in his older years; contributing in a positive way to his community and sharing his wisdom, experience and good fortune with the next generation. In the end, many of our late in life pursuits that we share with others can end up being more rewarding and meaningful to us than any personal accomplishments we achieve along the way.

“There’s a way to do it better – find it”

I mentioned in a previous blog about the serendipity of finding interesting or compelling books at the book swap shed of my little town’s Transfer Station. I recently finished reading a book that I happened to find there called The Grace of Great Things – Creativity and Innovation.

The author, Robert Grudin, a former professor of English at the University of Oregon, described the book as a study in creativity and innovation. The title refers to the words a monk is said to have spoken to the young child Michel Colombe (before he became a famous sculptor) as the monk observed the child forgetting to eat because carving things in wood seemed more important to him:

“Work, little one, look all you can, the steeple of St. Paul and the beautiful work of the Compagnons. Look, love God, and the grace of great things will be given to you.”

Even though I do not consider myself a particularly creative person, especially in the area of the arts, the study of creativity holds some interest for me because I have had a tendency throughout my personal and professional life to seek out innovative solutions to problems I encounter. My training in engineering and the sciences taught me to step back and look at a problem from all perspectives – and to devise solutions that are not always obvious or biased by traditional thinking.

Of all the kinds of joy in this life, none perhaps is as pure as the kind experienced when sudden insight leads to the discovery of an elegant solution to a vexing problem. I have felt this satisfaction often in my professional life while creating software applications to solve our customer’s problems and while patenting new test methods that made finding electrical defects on Electronic Printed Circuit Boards faster and safer.

The word inspiration originally meant a breath of divinity, and it seems appropriate that it is used to describe that moment when a creative solution flashes into your consciousness. To be inspired feels like a divine event – something that seems to come from beyond as the mind surrenders to a force outside its control.

Gruden’s study documented the characteristics and particular habits that creative people share and that lead to original thinking and bold ideas. Those looking to become more inventive should practice the following mental habits and attitudes that Gruden writes are most congenial to inspiration:

Passion for Work – People are often advised to find a job that they love and it appears that those who do are usually the most creative. Creativity blossoms when you fully identify with your work and see it as an expression of your character.

People who love their job, derive pleasure from it and like the border collie are happiest when they are working and have a job to do. Their passion for work inhabits the full volume of their mind and persists during leisure hours and even during their sleep. In the creative life there is no distinction between leisure and work. Creative people belong to their work, and their commitment is rewarded with unexpected discovery.

Love of the Problematic – People who spend their lives ignoring and denying problems rarely become inspired. Conversely, the minds of creative people instinctively love tackling problems and discovering solutions. Creative people are sometimes seen as troublemakers because they upset the status quo by exposing problems that have been ignored.

Thomas Edison would instruct his engineers to observe closely and pay attention to things that did not totally fit. When he saw the slightest flaws with a proposed solution he would send them back to the drawing board with the instructions “there is a better way – find it“.

Love of Beauty – Moments of creativity, when inspiration leads to the discovery of an elegant solution to a problem one has worked on so passionately are rare.

Innovative people see great beauty in these moments when they come and they strive to capture the same feeling of beauty in all the other areas of their life.

A Sense of Wholeness – Creative people are good at looking at the big picture. When examining a problem, they are able to deconstruct the individual elements that form an object and see how the various parts are interconnected.

This quality opens up perspectives that allow them to visualize the true identity of a problem and it encourages their minds to explore new thought patterns and see potential discontinuities and anomalies that others don’t.

Boldness and a Sense of Openness – A willingness to follow good ideas despite their forbidding strangeness takes courage. Creative people do not fear ideas and are willing to ignore prior assumptions and walk on the edge of chaos; opening themselves to bold new ideas even at the risk of looking ridiculous.

Innocence and Playfulness – Inventive people have a way of looking at each new project as a blank slate – unbiased by tradition and what has come before. They are like inquisitive babies trying to make sense of an item without known purpose or use.

They do not put limits on solutions (like people whose only tool is a hammer want to define define all problems as a nail) and they are happy to travel down unexpected paths (like a cook who turns a failed mousse into a successful chocolate topping).

Suffering – It is not obvious, but inspiration is related to suffering. Creative people often have to suffer through failure of experiments, the refutation of hypotheses, the trashing of one’s own findings, dead-ends, disapproval and rejection.

Even the process of achieving professional credentials is usually full of pain (endless study, practice, humiliation by teachers, competition with peers, the sting of criticism and the fear of inadequacy). Inspiration is impossible without groaning effort, without the painful winning of skill, and hard-earned expertise.

Pain has always functioned as a stimulus to material progress. It was fear pain, and grief that helped drive the great medical and social advances that exponentially increased the length of the human lifetime.

Individuals who spend their lives in the persistent avoidance of pain are not likely to amount to much. When pain and suffering is duly faced and endured, like exercise, it builds the endurance and humility that make us amenable to inspiration.

Remembrance – Many noted revolutionaries and innovators claim that their ideas were not new. They explain that they were simply maintaining continuity with the past and restoring old ideas that had been corrupted or forgotten.

Creative people utilize their remembrance of the past to invent new applications that incorporate old ideas – they are adept at rediscovering something that was always true and adapting it to a new application.

Liberty – The essence of inventiveness lies in recognizing that the world is capable of innumerable configurations. Those who have lived long and paid attention know not only that things can change – but also that it is a law of nature that they must change.

Successful people anticipate how things are changing or will change in the future and work within a system that gives them the freedom and liberty to advocate solutions that will best meet those changing needs.

People living in autocratic and rigid systems of governance do not advance as fast as those living in a free and democratic system because the barriers those societies set in place do not empower their citizens to pursue their ideas to their full potential.

When looked at together, these identified habits and attitudes map out an environment that makes the mind fertile for creativity and the growth of inspiration – planting a virtual garden for the inquiring mind to wander. For most people, visits to this garden are rare, only occurring by chance and surprise.

That is the case for me. I recognize in myself many of the qualities and characteristics that Gruden associates with creative people and I have been fortunate to experience the thrill and satisfaction that comes from discovering innovative test methods and software applications during my long work career.

But those were high points in a career that also included plenty of low points, times when the enemies of discovery (depression, complacency and laziness) took root in me. Those were unproductive times in my life because people who are lazy or just trying to get by seldom make important contributions.

I am finding that just because I am retired now doesn’t mean I need to stop striving to be creative. The habits of creative people identified by Gruden are not limited to the workplace. I find these same habits of creativity can be applied while I am fishing, while I am working on household projects, while I am coding fun software programs for my grandsons to play and even while performing my volunteering activities teaching children and serving on the school board.

It is important to mention, amidst all this praise about the delights of inspiration, that creativity does not always confine itself to happy subjects or result in happy outcomes. History, unfortunately, is filled with examples of tragic visions and genius put to use in the service of malice. Knowing that creativity can be put to dangerous applications gives us an obligation to always be on the lookout for it and to speak out against it when we see it employed in harmful ways.

In the end though I believe there is a major connection between ethics and creativity. The great majority of inventions and innovations throughout the ages have been driven by a desire to make the world a better place. That 15th century monk was on to something profoundly relevant when he linked the word grace, and the pattern of moral strengths that it suggests, as the foundation of major creative achievement.

May you practice the habits of creative thinking to free your mind and to make your life and our world a better place… so that the grace of great things will be given to you too.

Genius makes a virtue of its limitations

Recently my wife had an allergic reaction which affected her eyes for several weeks. Her eyelids became red and swollen; not the ideal look for someone who serves in a public relations role and who is often the face of the company to the clients she works with. The malady, in typical fashion, did not deter my wife. She just passed off the condition as eyes highlighted with red mascara and coordinated her outfits to better match her new look. My wife is genius like that – she has a knack for turning lemons into lemonade, trash into treasure and adversity into advantage.

Her particular talents made me think of the observation “Genius makes a virtue of it’s limitations” that I read in a Montclair Times newspaper review by Eric Levin of a Bob Dylan concert. The review marveled how Dylan, even though his voice was “magnificently ravaged” by time and use and was limited to singing his songs using only two notes, was able to compensate for this limitation by adjusting the song arrangement and the lyric phrasing to mesmerizing effects until his voice became “two states of energy, hopping back and forth like electrons shifting orbits”.

Bob Dylan Poster – Art Courtesy of Milton Glaser

History is full of remarkable people like Bob, who not only overcome their limitations to do important work – but are also able to transform their limitations into virtues instead of letting them become impediments to their success.

Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder used their lack of sight to produce visionary new music. Helen Keller could not see or hear yet she became an influential author, lecturer and champion of women’s causes and of people with disabilities. Steve Jobs was given up for adoption, struggled with traditional schooling and was a  college dropout – yet he revolutionized both the computer and entertainment industries. Alan Turing channeled the persecution and stigma of being a gay man in the 1940’s by pioneering the field of computing and cracking the Nazi military encryption codes that helped the Allies to win World War II.

The great majority of us will never know or understand what it means to be a genius – they are a rare breed of people that are so gifted they seem to remain in existence separate from the rest of us.

But even though we can’t all be geniuses there is one trait we can try to adopt that all geniuses seem to share – and that is to not let our limitations prevent us from pursuing our callings. We too, if we are creative, can overcome our life’s challenges and discover ways that we can turn our limitations into strength. If we all did that, life would be a lot more interesting and fulfilling.