Iyengar presents “Considering Greater” as a handbook for developing with good and large concepts. “There isn’t any magic key. Anybody can open that black field of creativity,” she insists. She consists of step-by-step procedures, beginning with rigorously selecting an issue to work on, breaking it down and so forth. She offers workouts to readers to develop their idea-generating abilities.
I admit that I didn’t have the vitality to attempt her methods, so I can’t say in the event that they work. They appear to be properly obtained by college students at Columbia Enterprise College. What did seize me is her examples of profitable individuals who have achieved what she prescribes — creatively placing collectively concepts from disparate fields.
Take Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, the French sculptor who created the Statue of Liberty on the shoulders of giants. The statue “is the scale and type of the colossal statues guarding the Egyptian tombs,” she writes. “She has the position and siting of the Suez lighthouse” in Egypt, the place he initially tried to position a sculpture. “She has the posture of La Verité,” a nude portray by a up to date of Bartholdi. “She has the crown, identify, and symbolism of Libertas,” a Roman goddess. “And he or she has the face of his mom.”
Henry Ford obtained the thought for a transferring meeting line from the Chicago slaughterhouses. James Naismith invented the sport of basketball with bits from soccer, rugby and a sport he performed as a toddler, duck on a rock, whose goal was to throw stones at an opponent’s stone (the “duck”) to knock it off a boulder (the “rock”). The primary basket was actually a basket, made for peaches. Leonardo da Vinci, no much less a genius than Naismith (I’m kidding), “was consistently studying about many various issues — physics, chemistry, anatomy, engineering, portray, and sculpting,” she writes. “I think about him the primary particular person in recorded historical past to consciously acknowledge the worth of seeking out of area to generate new concepts.”
I requested Iyengar if her blindness affected her desirous about alternative and innovation. “The explanation I care a lot is as a result of once I was rising up there have been so few decisions that individuals thought I used to be able to,” she wrote by electronic mail. “So my methodology is in some ways about going from creativeness to an actual alternative. Are you able to make something and all the pieces doable? After all not. However I do imagine that you may make extra issues doable than we regularly initially assume.”
“Considering Greater” was written earlier than this 12 months’s explosion of progress in consumer-friendly, idea-generating synthetic intelligence instruments akin to the most recent variations of ChatGPT and DALL-E. They appear to do what Iyengar needs folks to do: mash up bits and items from many realms. The distinction, I suppose, is that Iyengar thinks innovation must be directed. “There are good experiments and dangerous experiments. I need you to keep away from the dangerous ones,” she writes.
Iyengar instructed me that giant language fashions “will solely assist us be extra artistic.” Some folks will use them extra deftly than others, simply as some individuals are higher than others at utilizing Google to search out info, she mentioned.
