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

Minds do not leap. Observation, evaluation, and iteration, not sudden shifts of perception, solve problems and lead us to creation.

Creation is destination, the consequence of acts that appear inconsequential by themselves but that, when accumulated, change the world. Creating is an ordinary act, creation its extraordinary outcome.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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