35 pages • 1 hour read
Kevin AshtonHow to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention, and Discovery
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Key Figures
Themes
Index of Terms
Important Quotes
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BetaChapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “Expect Adversity”
This chapter deals with the failure and rejection that are inevitable during the creation process. Ashton begins with the story of Judah Folkman, a medical researcher who theorized about starving tumors of their blood source. Before this time, the approach had always been to somehow attack tumors directly in order to kill them (with radiation, chemotherapy, etc.), and so Folkman’s colleagues rejected—even mocked—his ideas. However, he stuck with his theory until he was able to prove that he was right.
Ashton’s main point here is that failure is part of creation. The process is like a marathon one must endure, with failure and rejection built into it. Folkman faced them both before his ideas found vindication, and Ashton emphasizes that this is normal. Creation is like a maze that people need to work their way through by having faith in themselves and their ideas. A common misconception is that people warmly welcome new ideas when in fact the opposite is true. “Unfortunately, anyone who loves your idea the first time they hear it either loves you or wants something. What to expect when you’re inventing is rejection,” Ashton writes (79).
The author presents another example of rejection from early in the 20th century. A man named Franz Reichelt designed a kind of parachute-like clothing that he claimed would allow one to glide gently through the air to a soft landing. He scoffed at a competitor who had recently tested his more conventional parachute by attaching a dummy to it and throwing it from the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Reichelt was so certain of his own design that he said he himself would jump from the tower while wearing it. He did and promptly plummeted to his death. He had faced rejection by those who warned him it would not work, yet he forged ahead based on faith. This is Ashton’s formula for success, but with one crucial difference: Reichelt only had faith, ignoring his own data that indicated his design was flawed. He literally tried to create something in one big leap rather than working step by step through the problem.
Chapter 4 Summary: “How We See”
Here Ashton tackles the issue of how we see or perceive of a problem when working through it. He begins, as usual, with an anecdote that illustrates his point. A pathologist named Robin Warren discovered that a bacteria called H. pylori caused ulcers. This contradicted the long-held belief that bacteria could not grow in the stomach because of its high acidity level. Eventually, he proved his theory, and he and fellow researcher won the Nobel Prize for their efforts. Ashton notes, however, that Warren was not the first to notice this: “H. pylori has now been found in medical literature dating back to 1875. When Robin Warren discovered it, it had been seen and not believed for 104 years” (95).
Research has shown that people have “intentional blindness” and “selective attention.” The brain filters out information it deems unimportant in any given situation. In one example, people walking and talking on a cell phone did not notice a clown on a unicycle crossing right in front of them. This is what happened with the H. pylori bacterium: researchers could see it under a microscope, but for decades researchers ignored it based on past assumptions.
Selective attention is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s a result of expertise. Chess players at the highest level, for instance, can survey a chessboard faster than even those just one level below them because they know exactly what to look for. This is true in all fields: Expertise translates into speed, due in part to the efficiency of selective attention. At the same time, however, those at the top of their field learn to look at a situation with fresh eyes—something Ashton calls “beginner’s mind.”
Finally, Ashton wonders, if you see something new, as Warren did, how do you know you’re right? The trick again is in taking small steps through the process of direction. At each step, you’re tested and can change your thinking. You get into trouble when you try to make a big leap based solely on conviction.
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
Having argued in the first chapters that creativity is innate and ordinary, Ashton then examines some of the hurdles involved in creating. The first is simply failure, which deters many people from continuing. In part, this stems from the creativity myth Ashton is trying to disprove. Because so many people think of creating as the result of a flash of insight, when it doesn’t come readily, they may think that’s the end of it. Most people don’t have the author’s perspective that creating is the result of hard work and many steps. From that point of view, failure seems natural: You hit a dead end and go back to the drawing board. Creating is like working through any other problem, and that involves a certain amount of failure.
Another hurdle is rejection, not just by strangers but also by those in the same field. People don’t always welcome new ideas with open arms, and there’s a good reason for this. Ashton explains that the survival of the species requires both the new and skepticism of the new. New things are necessary to solve problems that arise, but if people accept these ideas without hesitation, the risk would exist that something bad would cause harm. Rejection acts as a kind of filter to ensure that people only accept tried-and-true creations. Faith is what gets creators past both failure and rejection, but not failure alone. As the example of Franz Reichelt in Chapter 3 shows, faith must accompany facts for a creator to be successful.
Finally, how the perception of things can be a hurdle to successful creation. Selective attention automatically filters out certain things based on assumptions. If those assumptions are wrong, people can miss even obvious things. Ashton also presents research in Chapter 4 about “dissonance.” When we believe something strongly, we become certain of it—even in the face of contradictory evidence. Dissonance is the gap between certainty and reality, so much so that it rejects new evidence due to rigid beliefs. Sometimes a scientific revolution is necessary to change such beliefs. This is what science historian Thomas Kuhn called a “paradigm shift.” When this happens, the underlying assumptions and theories of a certain field explode, resulting in an entirely new worldview in that field.
