How to Think Like Einstein: Simple Ways to Break the Rules and Discover Your Hidden Genius
272
How to Think Like Einstein: Simple Ways to Break the Rules and Discover Your Hidden Genius
272eBook
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Overview
You can be a genius too! Learn the skills and hacks from the greatest minds in history!
From creative business and to improving relationships, How to Think Like Einstein provides the tools for the everyday challenges at the home and in the office. Innovator and author Scott Thorpe guides you step-by-step through the process of freeing yourself from your "rule ruts" so you can dream up amazing (and doable) solutions to the seemingly impossible. With brand-new material for today's readers, this new edition will reveal how you can solve problems in astonishing ways, including:
- thinking like a bug
- organizing a party
- learning the game of poker
- pretending you're James Bond
- acting like a millionaire
- and more!
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781492626282 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Sourcebooks |
| Publication date: | 12/01/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Scott Thorpe is an electrical engineer, MBA, and registered patent attorney, protecting software, electrical, and semiconductor inventions. Mr. Thorpe also designed robots and flight simulators, launched $1.3 Billion in new products, and was part of two start-ups with successful IPOs. He is an avid skier and mountain biker.
Read an Excerpt
How to Think Like Einstein
Simple Ways to Break the Rules and Discover Your Hidden Genius
By Scott Thorpe
Sourcebooks, Inc.
Copyright © 2015 Scott ThorpeAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4926-2628-2
CHAPTER 1
EINSTEIN'S SECRET
"Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth."
– ALBERT EINSTEIN
This book will teach you to create solutions to your toughest, even impossible, problems. You will learn techniques implicit in the solutions of Albert Einstein, history's greatest problem solver. Einstein solved some of the world's most bewildering problems. He was successful because he had a very different way of thinking. You can learn to think in the same way. You won't become any smarter, but you will start seeing the solutions you have been ignoring.
These techniques, and those of others presented here, are not just for unraveling the mysteries of the universe. By learning new ways to solve problems, you can increase the profitability of your business, improve educational opportunities for your children, make artistic and creative breakthroughs, and enhance the quality of your life. Tough problems of all kinds can be resolved because one universal principle is at the core of learning to think like a genius: you've got to break the rules.
Einstein was one of the world's most natural rule breakers, the James Dean of science. He didn't just challenge physical laws. He flaunted tradition and outraged governments. Breaking rules caused him constant trouble, but Einstein's audacious willingness to fracture any rule was at the core of his genius. He was a great problem solver because he was a superb rule breaker. It is a common trait of genius, and a skill that can be learned and cultivated. We can all think like Einstein, if we just learn to break the rules.
RULE RUTS
"Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions."
– ALBERT EINSTEIN
If you can't solve a problem, it is probably because you are stuck in a rule rut. We all have rules — ingrained patterns of thinking that we mistake for truth. Our rules form naturally. Ideas become rules with repeated use. When a rule rut forms, all conflicting ideas are ignored.
Rules are not always bad things. They are like railroad tracks. If you want to go where the track goes, they are perfect. But like destinations without a rail line, some solutions cannot be reached by following our rules. The only way to get there is to leave the tracks.
Rules stunt innovative thinking because they seem so right. They hide the numerous superior solutions that exist but are outside our rule ruts. These great solutions will only be found by breaking the rules.
No one is immune to rule ruts. Even Einstein was stymied for years by one of his prejudices. But to him, the offending rule seemed inviolable.
You may not be interested in discovering the laws that govern the universe, but you still have tough problems to solve. Your problems may even be tougher than Einstein's. You may be competing against smart people, working in an environment that is constantly changing, or trying to make a big change. Your challenge may seem impossible. But there is an answer — if you can learn to break the rules.
Our biggest obstacle when we are faced with an impossible problem is inside us. It is that our experiences, mistaken assumptions, half-truths, misplaced generalities, and habits keep us from brilliant solutions. The great new ideas and the vital solutions exist. They are just outside the prevailing thought. Otherwise someone would have found them already. You must break the rules to solve impossible problems.
BREAKING RULES AND SOLVING PROBLEMS
"I sometimes ask myself how it came about that I was the one to develop the theory of relativity. The reason, I think, is that a normal adult never stops to think about problems of space and time. These are things which he has thought about as a child. But my intellectual development was retarded, as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown up."
– ALBERT EINSTEIN
Saying that rule breaking was the secret to Einstein's genius is a big claim. He was also naturally brilliant and extremely tenacious. How do we know that rule breaking wasn't just an ancillary quirk of his genius? Let's do a simple thought experiment to learn what was responsible for Einstein's great ideas. Einstein loved thought experiments, so it is appropriate that he is the subject of ours. We will examine Einstein's intelligence, knowledge, and rule breaking and see how they affected his creative output. And we will do it without any complicated physics or math.
Einstein's intelligence was consistently high throughout his life. We will represent this as a horizontal line in our thought experiment (Figure 1.1). Einstein's vast knowledge of mathematics and science increased steadily throughout his life. We will represent his knowledge as a line sloping upward. So far this is just what we would expect from a genius.
But when we look at Einstein's problem-solving output, something seems wrong. Beginning in 1905, just out of the university, Einstein had a prolonged period of truly revolutionary thinking. With three papers, written in his spare time, he started science down the road of relativity, quantum mechanics, and atomic theory. For almost twenty years, he made important advances in science. In particular, he developed his special and general theories of relativity, which among other things make your GPS work. Even in the twenty-first century, experimental physicists are still finding new ways that the Einstein of this period was right. It is an incredible intellectual legacy.
And then, abruptly, Einstein's problem solving dropped off. We will represent this decline as a downward sloping line. Einstein continued to work hard on the important problems of physics. In fact, he claims to have spent a hundred times more effort on quantum physics problems than he had spent on relativity. He was still brilliant. He knew even more about physics and math. He had uninterrupted time for his work and constant collaboration with the world's greatest minds. But he didn't solve any more important scientific problems.
We would expect Einstein's problem solving to correlate with his intelligence and knowledge. Instead, his problem-solving ability declined as his knowledge increased. Innovation was highest when knowledge was lowest. It seems wrong. We would dismiss the results of our thought experiment if the pattern weren't repeated in the lives of so many brilliant people. People willing to break the rules solve impossible problems. They are usually newcomers to the field, without the baggage of years of precedent.
It wasn't Einstein the wise, old professor that first solved the mysteries of space and time. He was a kid a few years out of college. He worked at the Swiss patent office reviewing improvements to laundry wringers. He did physics on the side. And he was breaking rules.
The problem Einstein solved that gave us E = mc was an old one. A generation of scientists had been trying to understand why light always seems to be going the same speed relative to the observer. Regardless of whether you are moving toward a beam of light or away from it, the light's speed is the same. It was one of science's most important and baffling problems. Many brilliant people came close to a solution, but they all failed because of a rule.
Hundreds of years earlier, Isaac Newton had decreed that time was absolute. It did not run faster or slower. It was the universe's constant. Newton's reasoning made sense, and the idea became firmly and deeply embedded in the mind of every scientist that followed. It was at the foundation of all scientific knowledge. Scientists couldn't even imagine breaking the "time is absolute" rule, so they couldn't solve the problem.
Einstein had no trouble violating Newton's "time is absolute" rule. He simply imagined that time could run faster for one object than for another. That changed the problem completely. A few lines of math (which can be found in Appendix B) started Einstein down a road that has revolutionized our world. Einstein solved science's most difficult problem by breaking a rule.
If rule breaking was the secret to Einstein's genius, then we should expect his problem solving to decline when he didn't break the rules — and that is exactly what happened. As physicists built on Einstein's work, they created a new theory. At its core was the concept of uncertainty — that some outcomes couldn't be predicted. Einstein found uncertainty troubling. Reason told him that the universe must be predictable. He hated uncertainty. He couldn't believe that the universe was driven by random events. And so his discoveries stopped, and he became another smart man confused by his own common sense.
IMPOSSIBLE PROBLEMS: WINNING AT TIC-TAC-TOE
Most impossible problems are like winning at tic-tac-toe. The game seems impossible to win. You may play over and over, using different strategies, but without any success. But you can win at tic-tac-toe and solve other hopeless problems if you break the rules.
Extra Turns
It is easy to win at tic-tac-toe if you take an extra turn. "What?" you are probably thinking. "You can't do that!" OK, it is cheating, but it works as shown in Figure 1.2 on the following page. It solves the problem. The choice is break the rules or fail.
You might not want to cheat at tic-tac-toe, but what about an important problem, a tough problem that you need solved? Could you break the rules to create a solution? Of course, I am not talking about moral laws, but rather the rules in your head that dictate how the problem should be solved.
Few people consider taking an extra turn (cheating) in the real world, but it is actually a time-honored solution. For example, after a battle during the American Civil War, Confederate General Robert E. Lee told his subordinates that he was positive that Union General Ulysses S. Grant would move to Spotsylvania, since that was his best option. Lee devised a shortcut to that position and told his troops to move by it. Lee's troops took an extra turn, in a manner of speaking, and marched to Spotsylvania before Grant's army could arrive.
Extra turns are common in business as well. When the makers of Tylenol learned that Datril, a similar pain reliever, would be launched at a significant discount, they took an extra turn. They matched Datril's price before Datril could advertise its cost advantage. The Datril introduction fizzled and Tylenol maintained its market share.
Use the Other Guy's Asset
There are many ways to win at tic-tac-toe or solve impossible problems. It isn't hard to get three in a row if you use an X with two of your Os as shown in Figure 1.3. Why limit yourself to your own ideas?
Admiral Harry Yarnell of the United States Navy originally developed the basic plan for Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. He determined the best routes and described the strategy. He even demonstrated how it should work with two U.S. aircraft carriers in 1932. The Imperial Japanese Navy, recognizing the value of the idea, turned an American admiral's plan into their own successful attack against the United States Navy. It didn't bother them to use American battle plans. If it works, use it, regardless of the source. Whose idea could you use to solve your problem?
Define Victory Flexibly
You can win at tic-tac-toe or solve other tough problems if you use a flexible definition of victory. Allow for a kink in your row, as shown in Figure 1.4, and you will win every time. Sometimes our conditions for victory are too stringent or inappropriate. When Winston Churchill was thirty-five and served as Britain's home secretary, some of his friends were discussing how they had not expected to rise to their important positions so early in life. But Churchill just fumed, "Napoleon won Austerlitz at my age." Churchill couldn't win his personal contest with ambition because his definition of victory was too lofty. Changing the definition of success can make a solution possible.
Cooperate
The rule that someone must lose may be your biggest obstacle to either of you winning. Cooperate with your opponent, as shown in Figure 1.5, so that you both win. I once watched a building burn to the ground. The owner was happy about it. So was the fire department. The owner needed his building demolished, and the fire department needed a place to practice their firefighting. Both needs were solved with perfect synergy.
All of these solutions break the rules of tic-tac-toe, just as Einstein broke the rules of physics. You will not win at tic-tac-toe or solve impossible problems just by trying harder. You must break the rules.
EINSTEIN THINKING: BREAKING THE RULES
"Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligent picture of the world; he then tries to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus overcome it."
– ALBERT EINSTEIN
Thinking like Einstein works because the biggest obstacles to solving tough problems are in our heads. Breaking rules is hard. This is why there are so many smart people but so few Einsteins. You may have to violate a cherished rule to solve your toughest problem. Henry Ford made a fortune mass-producing identical, practical Model T cars. He almost lost that fortune because of his Model T rule. His competitors offered frills and options for the increasingly affluent middle class. Henry lost market share making no-frills cars because he wouldn't break his own rule. The Ford Motor Company probably would have gone out of business if World War II and the complete conversion of Ford factories to military production hadn't saved it.
The rule you need to break may transgress common sense. You and your colleagues will be certain you are making a foolish mistake. But violating common sense may be the only way to solve the problem. By his own admission, Einstein's greatest mistake was modifying some equations to make the universe conform to his common sense. His calculations told him that the universe must either be expanding or contracting. But he felt that it must be static — one glance at the night sky confirmed this truth. Only later, when astronomers observed the expansion of the universe, did he correct his theory.
You can solve your own impossible problems like Einstein. It won't be easy to do, but it will be fun when you do it. Breaking rules is exhilarating. If you can learn to break the rules that are holding you back, the universe will be yours.
CHAPTER 2OUR UNIVERSE OF TRUTH
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool."
– RICHARD FEYNMAN
Rule-breaking thinking works because the solution to persistently stubborn problems can usually be found outside our own universes of truth. Each of us dwells in the center of our own private universe of truth, and within are ideas, facts, and principles that we are absolutely certain of. That certainty is well-founded. The truth of our universe is regularly validated by what we read, by our experiences, and by those we associate with.
Of course, we know our universes aren't perfect. We know that we don't understand many things, such as supersymmetry, Peruvian cooking, or how to appreciate a good cricket match. However, we are sure we have the facts for the important things.
We maintain great confidence that the ideas, facts, and principles of our universe are all true — in spite of strong evidence to the contrary. For example, my universe of truth is probably very different from yours. That should tip both of us off that neither of us has a complete picture. Instead, we both rationalize that the other simply hasn't seen the light yet.
In addition, we know that our universes of truth have changed through the years. We have abandoned some ideas and adopted others. This should also make it clear that our current universes of truth are probably not perfect. However, we generally rationalize that we have outgrown our foolish thinking, and that said foolishness is now behind us.
Intellectually, we may be able to admit that all of our opinions, beliefs, and ideas about the world are not perfect. Yet most people cannot identify any of their core beliefs that might be wrong. Minor ideas may be missing a few facts, but when it comes to important thinking, we are certain that we have the answers. All of them. Only an idiot would suggest otherwise.
I would suggest otherwise. Our universes of truth are far from perfect, and because they're imperfect, they hide many important ideas. When we attempt to solve problems, we naturally limit ourselves to solutions that conform to the rules of our universes of truth, cutting ourselves off from other universes of superior solutions.
Many problems, including most of the unsolved ones, can't be solved within your current universe of truth. You probably gave up on many of them years ago because there seemed to be no solution. However, the real problem is in our heads.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from How to Think Like Einstein by Scott Thorpe. Copyright © 2015 Scott Thorpe. Excerpted by permission of Sourcebooks, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword,Chapter 1. Einstein's Secret,
Chapter 2. Our Universe of Truth,
Chapter 3. Thinking like Einstein,
Chapter 4. Selecting a Great Problem,
Chapter 5. No Bad Ideas,
Chapter 6. Breaking Patterns,
Chapter 7. Breaking Rules,
Chapter 8. Growing a Solution,
Chapter 9. Avoiding Martyrdom,
Chapter 10. Einstein Thinking in Organizations,
Chapter 11. Wilder Ideas,
Chapter 12. Everyday Einstein Thinking,
Conclusion,
Appendix A. Einstein Thinking Guides,
Appendix B. Einstein's Equation,
About the Author,