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

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2014

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Chapter 2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-6

Chapters 7-9

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Themes

Creativity and the Process of Creating

The main theme of the book is that creativity is not a rare trait reserved only for the select few who are specially endowed. Instead, Ashton asserts, creativity is what makes us human; in other words, we are all creative. The prevailing myth that one either has creativity or doesn’t stops most people from pursuing creative endeavors, and Ashton wants to free people of this self-imposed limitation. He posits this theme right from the beginning, in both the Preface (“The Myth”) and Chapter 1 (“Creating Is Ordinary”), but it is something the author returns to again and again throughout the text.

The second section of Chapter 1 makes the case for this theme in a very straightforward way. Ashton simply estimates how many different people received a patent in the United States from 1790 to 2011, coming up with a figure of roughly six million. Thus, he concludes, “Creating is not extraordinary, even if its results sometimes are. Creation is human” (9). He then presents a mixture of research and anecdotes to prove his point. For example, he cites studies that had the subjects talk out loud as they solved a problem. This showed that the pattern people followed was the same: “begin with something familiar, evaluate it, solve any problems, and repeat until a satisfactory solution is found” (37). He also tells the story of the Wright brothers being the first to fly an airplane, noting that they, too, began with something familiar and then built upon it.

Seeing Like a Beginner

Expertise comes from two seemingly contradictory abilities. The first is “selective attention.” As people gain experience in any field, they are able to assess a given situation faster than others. They know what to look for and where to look for it. The steps to solving a problem are the same as for anyone, but they can perform them faster, homing in on just the aspects that matter. Ashton uses top-level chess players and their expert abilities at reading the chessboard to underscore this concept.

The second ability is what Ashton calls “beginner’s mind.” This comes from a book by Japanese monk Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. The concept, called shoshin in Japanese, is that one needs to see things as a beginner, not an expert, to really see it thoroughly. Experts rely on assumptions gained from experience and the collective knowledge in a field. Sometimes this can blind them to something obvious. The example Ashton gives of this is Robin Warren discovering the H. pylori bacterium in stomach lining—something researchers had seen for decades but ignored based on the conventional wisdom. Warren saw it as a beginner would and realized it might be important in treating ulcers.

A true master must be able to employ both of the above. This is not as impossible as it sounds. In the West, Ashton writes, perception is based on a binary fashion: either/or. Opposing ideas, however, can exist simultaneously in one’s mind. According to the author, “The greatest test of your expertise is how explicitly you understand your assumptions” (110). Assumptions are what prevent beginner’s mind, so someone with mastery in a field is able to review their assumptions and set them aside when necessary.

Opportunity

Ashton devotes all of Chapter 5 to this theme, using the story of Rosalind Franklin, who conducted groundbreaking research into the structure of genetic material. First, because she was a woman, her work suffered in her lifetime, and the three men who later won the Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA purportedly stole Franklin’s results to further their own research. As Ashton explains, though, Franklin was lucky in a sense, because only a short time before, women were unable to attend university and Britain’s premier scientific institution, the Royal Society. (The latter accepted its first woman in 1945). Ashton’s takeaway, forcefully stated here and elsewhere, is that the opportunity to create shouldn’t exclude anyone—for any reason.

Assigning Credit

The very idea of giving credit to a single person for an accomplishment is something the author questions. Everyone benefits from countless others who came before, as well as those who work contemporaneously. Ashton traces the history of Franklin’s discoveries back to the work of Johannes Kepler on snowflakes at the very beginning of the 17th century, and the origins of research into the X-ray not long afterward. He finds it difficult to assign credit to anyone who has necessarily borrowed from past work, concluding that “We owe nearly everything to others. Generations are also generators” (137). Although he explicitly analyzes this with regard to Franklin’s work, it applies equally to every other discovery and invention mentioned in the book.