Month: February 2021

The other week I finished reading Tom Vanderbilt’s book Beginners: The Curious Power of Lifelong Learning. It’s a fairly easy read, but if you’re strapped for time there’s an article in The Guardian which is a really helpful distillation of the book. The story starts with an anecdote about learning to play chess as an adult (very topical since we’ve all just binge-watched The Queen’s Gambit!), but it goes onto explore the broader benefits of learning something new, and continuing to keep learning new things.

The central idea here is that the beginner phase has value in itself and we shouldn’t think of it as something that just has to be ‘got through’ on the way to competence. There is the Dunning-Kruger effect, the well-known concept that ‘a little knowledge is a dangerous thing’ and the idea that once you progress beyond the absolute beginner you start to develop habits (sometimes bad habits) and perhaps you’re not even aware of them. The mind of the beginner is open to wider possibilities and this has knock-on effects in your wider life, it makes you more open-minded generally and a more creative thinker. There’s a lovely Zen quote from Shunryu Suzuki: “In beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in expert’s mind there are few.”

But there are obviously difficulties in trying to learn something new as an adult:

1) There’s an assumption that by the time we are adults we ought to be competent at things. But I think we need to give ourselves permission to be bad at something and enjoy it anyway. It’s okay to make mistakes, as Carl Jung said: “Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon errors also.” Young kids don’t put pressure on themselves to be ‘achieving’ something in their hobbies, they just do things they enjoy.

2) There’s our fear of looking silly, a four-year old making their first tottering moves on roller-skates is cute, a forty-four year old in lycra and kneepads, trying to learn to roller-blade is perceived as ridiculous! But there’s real joy in being able to laugh at ourselves. Maybe one of the secrets of happiness is not giving a damn what other people think!

3) And then there’s our old enemy, time! It’s easier to learn to play piano when you practice for an hour every day and when you’re a kid, and you don’t have to do a full-time job, fold the laundry, empty the dishwasher, and re-grout the bathroom you just have more time on your hands. But as an adult maybe we appreciate how valuable our spare time is, and therefore we’re able to be more focused and efficient when we do find five minutes to practice a card trick, or half an hour at lunchtime to read about renaissance art, or an hour in the evening to write Python code.

Nevertheless, learning new things is hard, and if you have the disadvantage of not being an eight-year-old, then why bother? But here is where it gets interesting.

No education is ever wasted

First there’s the idea that education of any kind is never (or unlikely to be) wasted, you never know when a skill or piece of knowledge will be applicable to a new situation and the more tools you have at your disposal, the better able you are to respond to different situations. Vanderbilt gives the example of (polymath) Claude Shannon, an early proponent of information theory, who would plunge into all kinds of pursuits such as juggling or poetry; who knows how his brain worked, but making connections is key, and somewhere in the mix of juggling patterns and poetic structure he found something new. Most things we learn have some transferable skills, so the dexterity learned from solving a Rubik’s cube might be beneficial when playing piano, or chess may help concentration. There are lots of good examples of how you can transfer your learning from one area and apply it to another. There’s a great story about how Jon Tannahill took the dedication and rigorous approach he was familiar with from training for rowing and applied it to Space Invaders. Vera Wang was a figure-skater before she turned to fashion. Or how about chess prodigy Demis Hassabis who moved onto creating award winning computer games, founded DeepMind, and developed the AI programme AlphaGo which defeated a Go grandmaster. (DeepMind is basically about understanding how solving one problem can leapfrog to solutions to other problems; creating AI to solve general problems rather than specific ones, essentially an AI with transferable skills!)

Learning to learn, unlearn and re-learn

But also just the act of learning something new makes us practiced at learning, in the book, Vanderbilt starts with learning chess, but moves onto trying to pick up a number of different skills, effectively keeping himself at the learner stage. As Ravi Kumar (president of Infosys) puts it: “You have to learn to learn, learn to unlearn, and learn to re-learn.” These all seem like critical skills in an ever-changing world! It seems to be important to learn across a range of different domains and this reminded me of a brilliant TED talk by Emeilie Wapnick about not having one true calling, but embracing a number of different things and seeing where the combination of disciplines takes you. Emilie calls people with multiple interests and multiple skills multipotentialites, and she’s a big fan of the idea that having broad interests brings a range of benefits such as: generating ideas, being adaptable, and of course being able to learn rapidly because you are practiced at the art of learning. 

Fluid dynamics

Learning new things opens us up to wider possibilities and, as mentioned in this blog, it gives us options. Being a beginner helps to develop, what Raymond B. Cattell and John Horn refer to as ‘fluid intelligence‘ the ability to respond to novel situations and solve novel problems, as opposed to ‘crystallised intelligence’ which is using what experience and knowledge we already have. Niels Bohr said: “An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” this is crystallised intelligence, an expert has built up a wide catalogue of mistakes which they have made and know to avoid in future; this helps in repeating the same problem or responding to the same situation (or very similar ones at least), but it is the initial phase of the beginner where we are continually solving the problem from first principles, not relying on past experience, that we develop an understanding of how to solve problems generally, this is fluid intelligence.

Wonderstuff

There’s the idea that learning things helps us to maintain a sense of wonder, to discover new things and perhaps to see the world with new eyes. As Vanderbilt puts it: “Learning new skills also changes the way you think, or the way you see the world. Learning to sing changes the way you listen to music, while learning to draw is a striking tutorial on the human visual system.” Or as Picasso said: “All children are born artists, the problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.” Maintaining that childlike sense of wonder is something that becomes more and more difficult as we get older and more cynical, but perhaps by exposing ourselves to new experiences we can in some way maintain the capacity to surprise ourselves. This reminds me of neuroscientist Beau Lotto’s TED talk on experiencing awe; in the talk he uses an aerial performance by Cirque Soleil to explain how experiencing awe can make us more comfortable with uncertainty, lead us to strive less for closure, and gives us a greater appetite for risk (which sounds just like my kids!). This can allow us to develop and learn and be more creative ourselves. He quotes Joseph Campbell: “Awe is what enables us to move forward.” or as Lotto himself puts it: “Your brain only learns if you move. Life is movement.”

Machines for learning

Finally there’s a lovely thought that learning things is just what we are meant to do. Perhaps one of the most important things about learning new things, is that it reassures us that we are still capable of learning new things. And that we still have the capacity to grow, to change, and perhaps even occasionally surprise ourselves!

Our ability to learn and adapt has certainly contributed to humans’ success as a species. The idea that our brains are ‘novelty-seeking machines’ is wonderful, that “humans seem to crave novelty, and novelty helps us learn” and that learning “equip[s] us to better handle future novelty” and therefore to deal with uncertainty and change. It seems there’s never been a more perfect time to learn something new!

Lately I’ve been thinking about innovation and the development of creative ideas. I’m generally interested in creativity and innovation, but I admit this recent foray is partly because we are currently living through a time of quite unprecedented uncertainty. Creative thinking helps us respond to uncertainty, because we can’t solve problems using the same thinking that created them, right? And also uncertainty can foster creativity, because it is a disruption to the status quo, and it must be easier to make something different when beginning from a different starting point?

I remembered a while ago reading Steven Johnson’s book ‘Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation‘. The book discusses innovation and different approaches to innovative thinking, and has some thoughts about how we can try and encourage ourselves to think innovatively and have creative ideas.

One of the ways we can be innovative is to borrow ideas from elsewhere. This reminded me of Austin Kleon’s book ‘Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative‘. (I happened across his blog a few months back.) He sums the book up thus: “The big idea… is that you are a mash-up of what you let into your life, and anyone can be creative if they surround themselves with the right influences, play nice, and work hard.” Or as Salvador Dalí put it: “Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.” So, borrowing is fine (with appropriate attribution of course!) and sometimes innovation can be as simple as taking an idea or a solution from one field and finding an application for it in another field. As Johnson explains in Where Good Ideas Come From, evolutionary biologists call this exaptation; the classic example being the premise that birds’ feathers originally evolved to provide warmth and were later adapted to help flight.

So borrowing ideas is good, but in order to effectively borrow ideas we need to have somewhere to borrow them from, we need to find influences to surround ourselves with, and this leads us to cultivating interesting networks. Another quote, this time from Dudley Field Malone who said: “I have never in my life learned anything from any man who agreed with me.” So we need to get out of our echo-chambers, have wide and diverse networks to draw on, and ideally these networks need to be constantly refreshed, changeable and evolving, in order to keep us supplied with fresh stimulus. The wider the variety of stimulus, the better chance of developing an innovative idea; so we should read widely, have challenging conversations, ask questions, and continue to keep exploring and learning new things, to gather as much information as we can. All of this can help us to foster creativity and spark ideas. 

But for me the most interesting idea is that innovation often comes from making connections. So by mixing things together you get something new, and indeed possibly even something that might be more than the sum of its parts. Steve Jobs said that “creativity is just connecting things” and perhaps that’s what Apple have done, connecting a music player with a mobile phone, connecting form with function, connecting design with technology. Or as Steve Johnson puts it: “Collisions lead to creativity, collisions that happen when different fields of expertise converge in some shared physical or intellectual space.” So as I’ve said before, interesting things happen where there are connections or junctions; in the borders, where things overlap; or where things change or transition from one thing to another. Where are we now if not in a time of change and transition?

I remembered a Guardian article and another blog I read a while ago, both about the importance of creativity in uncertain times. Some great thoughts here:

• Doing something creative can distract us from what is going on in the wider world; as Josh Hogan puts it: “When I’m focused on that one activity I’m not worrying about things that might happen in the future; it brings me back into the present moment because I have to pay attention to what I’m doing.”
• Creative activities can let our unconscious mind figure things out while we’re occupied with what is in front of us. As  Dr Daisy Fancourt says: “While activities such as creative writing can help you vent your emotions, other things like knitting or crafting can give us some space and a safe haven away from our stresses, which might provide a chance to think things through and find solutions.”
• Creativity is needed to drive change. Of course change is inevitable, “this too shall pass”, but if we want to proactively drive change then we need to think differently and creatively.
• Being creative gives us the ability to adapt and grow. So change can be external, or (often more interesting) internal. If we don’t change, we can’t adapt, we can’t grow and we can’t respond to external change; but more importantly, frankly we’re not really living!
• Creativity gives you a greater capacity to choose. Because thinking creatively gives us options, and having more options is always a good thing.

So being creative and thinking creatively is  good for us, as well as being a good way of responding to uncertainty. Essentially as I said at the outset, we can’t solve the problems we have using the same thinking that created them. The good news is that times of uncertainty can foster creativity, “necessity is the mother of invention” and all that, and there can be huge steps forward made in relatively short periods of time.

I got to reading about crisis-driven innovation and this almost inevitably leads to John F. Kennedy and his famous quote that: “The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word ‘crisis.’ One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity.” (Unfortunately according to Wikipedia this isn’t quite true, the second character means something more like ‘change point’, but we can still appreciate Kennedy’s point.) There are lots of examples of how crises help to drive innovation, for example the rapid development of radar technology during World War II, or the repurposing of automotive factories to build aeroplanes, or more recently Formula One teams making ventilators, and rapid development of vaccines.

I know that we are living in difficult times at the moment, and there’s no way that war or a pandemic could ever be described as a good thing, but I have to believe that there are some positives that might come out of this. There is a feeling that things will never quite return to how they were, and maybe that is a good thing? There will be impacts on many aspects of our lives as we find our ‘new normal’; things like travelling less, meeting virtually, working more flexibly. But the great thing about innovation is that you’re never quite sure when and where your ideas are going to come from, or where they are going to lead you. So perhaps the most interesting things that might change are things we haven’t even thought of yet. Innovation is often about trying to solve a problem, and we are currently trying to deal with one of the biggest problems to arise in our lifetimes, but it can also be about just making the world a better place, (even if only in a very small way).

So I’m going to finish this with some advice from ‘Where Good Ideas Come From’ on how to have creative ideas: “Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent. Build a tangled bank.”