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

Work is the soul of creation. Work is getting up early and going home late, turning down dates and giving up weekends, writing and rewriting, reviewing and revising, rote and routine, staring down the doubt of the blank page, beginning when we do not know where to start, and not stopping when we cannot go on. It is not fun, romantic, or, most of th

“Creative thinking is simply a special kind of problem-solving behavior.”

In every case, the pattern is the same: begin with something familiar, evaluate it, solve any problems, and repeat until a satisfactory solution is found.

Evaluation directs iteration.

Thinking is finding a way to achieve a goal that cannot be attained by an obvious action.

What the human race created was creation itself. The ability to change anything was the change that changed everything.

Most of our world is made of innovations inherited from people long forgotten—not people who were rare but people who were common.

Creation is human. It is all of us. It is everybody.

But when we look carefully, we will always find one small change leading to another, sometimes within one mind, often among several, sometimes across continents or between generations, sometimes taking hours or days and occasionally centuries, the baton of innovation passing in an endless relay of renewal.