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

It would seem that in today’s popularculture creativity is often associated

with some sort of innate ability orinherited trait. Yet, such is not onlymisinformation, it’s nonsense. Eachand every one of us holds the ability

to make things better, to improve ourlives, to innovate. I think that

perhaps the reason so many do notbelieve themselves to be creative is

because of this ridiculous notion thatonly those who are born with “it” can

be creative. The fact is thatcreativity, like anything else, is the

product of effort, of trying to besuccessful.

When entrepreneurs create aproduct, it did not simply spring tomind in its entirety. Rather, said

entrepreneur had an idea, an ideaothers have likely had, to be

honest, and then he/she acted onit. It is the action here thatdistinguishes the would-be

entrepreneur from the milliondollar man. The million dollar mantried, failed, tried and failed again,

and then tried again and againuntil they triumphed.

My preface aside, this is largely what "How toFly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation,

Invention, and Discovery" concerns. Theauthor, Kevin Ashton, does a brilliant job of

illustrating an abundance of man’s majorbreakthroughs and backing up said

breakthroughs with the facts that led up to it.Spoiler alert: they were not spontaneous.They took years and years of effort from

seemingly “average” individuals whodisplayed resilience, not genius.

Yet, while the book is certainlyworth reading, you could alsojust read the first chapter andunderstand the entire point. Infact, Ashton’s plot structure ofmoving from story-to-story to

merely articulate the sameexact message over and over

again can be a bit tedious; andto be frank, I kept hoping the

book would develop intosomething more. It didn’t.

Regardless, ultimately, I recommend it. How To Fly a Horse:The Secret History of Creation, Invention, and Discovery iscertainly inspiring, and does a wonderful job of bringing avery real, measurable dimension to creativity. We are all

“average,” yet it takes only one extraordinaryaccomplishment to make us a legend.

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