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

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

All that is necessary is to begin. I can’t is not true once we begin. Our first creative step is unlikely to be good. Imagination needs iteration. New things do not flow finished into the world. Ideas that seem powerful in the privacy of our head teeter weakly when we set them on our desk. But every beginning is beautiful. The virtue of a first ske

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

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 so around and inside us that we cannot look without seeing it or listen without hearing it. As a result, we do not notice it at all. We live in symbiosis with new.

To create is to work. It is that easy and that hard.

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

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.

Evaluation directs iteration.

Invention is incremental—a series of slight and constant changes.