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

According to the author, this is a special result of the regular thought process. Ashton disputes the notion of “creative thinking”: His thesis is that humans by nature are creative. Thus, he says, all thinking is just regular thinking. Creativity is the value we assign to what results from this thinking. Because of this, Ashton argues, creating is the result of hard work, available to everyone. This contradicts the long-held, romantic notion of creativity as a rare flash of insight.  

This is a kind of unspoken agenda present in all organizations. Outwardly, an organization may profess one thing but inwardly it may actually do something very different; the latter is the hidden curriculum. Ashton uses the example that organizations may openly value creativity in all official documentation and communication with employees, but not support it in reality. Organizations value compliance above all else, even to the detriment of creation. Employees pick up on this and adjust their behavior, resulting in a loss of creativity.

This is the use of electronic radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags in physical items to interact with them via the Internet. This may be to simply take inventory or to somehow control a product by adjustments through the Internet. Ashton coined this term after he pioneered the use of RFID for keeping a product in stock. It was this experience, after a long period of trial and error (and, by his own account, failure), that taught him the true nature of creating. It ran counter to everything he had read about creativity being a “magical” flash of insight accessible only to a privileged few. 

A Luddite was originally one of the group of weavers who protested the use of machines at English textile mills, starting in 1811. (Chapter 6 refers to an attack at a particular mill in 1812.) They called themselves “Luddites” based on the probably fictional account of a man named Ned Ludd who had earlier smashed machines used in knitting. The weavers were afraid that the machines would take away their jobs. Today, the term “Luddite” generally refers to someone who is against technology. 

This comes from Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and refers to the revolutions that science periodically undergoes. Kuhn thought that rather than science unfolding in uninterrupted linear progress, there are times when research does not fit into the existing theories. As this builds up, it reaches a point of crisis, resulting in a “paradigm shift,” or a new set of theories as a guiding framework. This begins a new era in science. Ashton uses this term in Chapter 4 (“How We See”) to explain what happened when Robin Warren’s research showed the existence of a bacterium in the stomach that people overlooked for decades because it was not part of the existing paradigm; the prevailing set of theories at the time just couldn’t accommodate it.