Crazy thinking is the hallmark of all revolutionary innovation and genius

Apple co-founder, the late Steve Jobs, paid attribute to ‘the crazy ones’, saying ‘they change things. They push the human race forward...’ Photo/FILE/REUTERS 

By MARVIN SISSEY

In Summary

• The genius is, not in succeeding mildly but in failing greatly. Your flaws then are but beautiful footsteps on the journey towards excellence.
• The natural innovators are those whose mindsets appear abstract to the ordinary eye. It is this fourth dimension that I will refer to as classic imagination.
• Only someone so passionate would be blind enough to allow himself to fail so spectacularly and then rise from the ashes like a phoenix — ready to change the world with his outrageously crazy innovations.

Niels Henrik David Bohr was a Jewish Danish physicist who received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1922 for his contributions towards modern understandings of atomic structure and quantum mechanics.

He is famed for many one-liners but I value most the wisdom in his retort to Wolfgang Pauli after the latter’s presentation of Heisenberg’s and Pauli’s Nonlinear field theory of elementary particles, at Columbia University in 1958. He told him thus, “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.”

My Oxford Advanced Learner’s dictionary defines the word crazy as an adjective that means ‘not sensible, stupid’. These are barely the two words that come to mind when we think about innovation and genius. Merriam Webster’s dictionary is a little kinder on the word, defining crazy as, full of cracks or flaws; being out of the ordinary; passionately preoccupied.

Three words: flaws; extraordinary and passion. These three words are the special elements that make crazy the very foundation of genius and innovation. Let me illustrate each in detail.

1) Flaws: Innovators are ready to be wrong.

Take Thomas Alva Edison (1847–1931), the world’s most prolific innovator and inventor of the 20th century. He holds 1,093 US patents in his name alone, as well as many patents in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. His numerous inventions impacted greatly on communication and, in particular, telecommunications. These included a stock ticker, a mechanical vote recorder, electrical power, recorded music motion pictures and a battery for an electric car.

But his greatest invention was the perfection of the light bulb as we know it today. Describing his numerous failed attempts at perfecting the light bulb, he had this to say, “I have not failed 1,000 times. I have successfully discovered 1,000 ways to NOT make a light bulb.”

The idea is that — even if you try and fail, it doesn’t mean that you didn’t learn something. The fact is that, innovators succeed purely because they are willing to have this flaw and not be perfect, they are willing to fail.

Words of Theodore Roosevelt come to mind , “Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though chequered by failure... than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor
suffer much, because they live in a grey twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”

Really, the genius is, not in succeeding mildly but in failing greatly. Your flaws then are but beautiful footsteps on the journey towards excellence.

2) Extraordinary imagination: innovators think in fourth dimension

We live in a three-dimensional world where every object or matter can be equated in terms of length, breadth and depth. For close to two centuries now, innovative mathematicians have been playing around with the idea of a fourth dimension. For a long time, this fourth dimension remained an abstract concept derived by generalising the rules of three-dimensional space.

The greatest breakthrough has been in algebra where through vectors and geometry, it is possible to conceptualise a four-dimensional space referred to as a Euclidean space which has a metric and norm, and so all directions are treated as the same. The additional dimension is indistinguishable from the other three. As you can guess, it is almost impossible to create this fourth dimension in a tangible form and this has led physicists to view it as a continuum called space time.

Despite my mathematics major background, I have to admit that I am still unable to conceptualise this additional dimension through the lens of a 3-D world. I can only try to imagine how this concept might be mind-boggling for the uninitiated. Yet the surprising thing is that, there are those among us who, despite having never stepped into an advanced geometry or calculus class, live their lives in a four-dimensional rather than three-dimensional space.

These are the people I refer to as the natural innovators whose mindsets appear abstract to the ordinary eye. It is this fourth dimension that I will refer to as classic imagination. In the works of J.K. Rowlings who wrote the Harry Porter series of books “Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and, therefore, the foundation of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.”