Rachel: Everything you've been told about creative genius is a lie. The lightning bolt of inspiration, the lone inventor in a lab, the 'aha!' moment... it's mostly a myth. The real story of creation is far more ordinary, and frankly, far more interesting. Justine: A lie? That's a strong word, Rachel. Are you telling me that Mozart and Einstein were just... grinders? That there’s no such thing as a special spark? Rachel: Well, that's the provocative argument at the heart of the book we're diving into today: How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention, and Discovery by Kevin Ashton. And what makes his perspective so compelling is that he’s not just an academic. Ashton is the British technologist who literally coined the term "the Internet of Things." He's an innovator who has been in the trenches. Justine: Okay, that gives him some serious street cred. He’s not just talking about creation; he’s lived it. So what’s his big idea? Rachel: His central argument is that creation isn't magic. It's work. It's a step-by-step process of problem-solving that is available to every single one of us. It’s not about being a genius; it’s about showing up and doing the work. Justine: That sounds both incredibly democratic and a little disappointing. I kind of like the idea of a lightning bolt of inspiration. You’re going to need a pretty powerful story to convince me. Rachel: I have the perfect one. And it starts with one of the most common flavors in the world, vanilla, and the 12-year-old slave who unlocked its secret.

Justine: A 12-year-old slave? Okay, you have my attention. I thought vanilla just... grew on trees? Rachel: Not exactly. For centuries, vanilla was one of the rarest spices on earth. The vanilla orchid is native to Mexico, and it could only be pollinated by one specific species of bee found there. People tried to transplant the orchids all over the world, to French colonies like the island of Réunion, but the plants would flower and then wither without producing any vanilla beans. Justine: So they had the plant, but no way to get the vanilla. A classic supply chain problem. Rachel: Precisely. For decades, the French colonists on Réunion were stumped. Then, in 1841, a plantation owner named Ferréol Bellier-Beaumont walked out to his garden and saw two vanilla beans growing on a vine that had been barren for twenty years. He was stunned. He asked who did it, and his 12-year-old slave, a boy named Edmond Albius, said, "I did." Justine: Wow. And I assume the owner was immediately skeptical. Rachel: Completely. He couldn't believe it. So he asked Edmond for a demonstration. Edmond, who had been taught about plant reproduction by Ferréol, had been observing the flowers. He took a tiny piece of bamboo, lifted the small flap inside the orchid flower that separated the male and female parts, and gently pinched them together. He had invented manual pollination for the vanilla orchid. Justine: That is incredible. A simple, elegant solution that all the trained botanists had missed. What happened to him? Rachel: Ferréol, to his credit, recognized the breakthrough. He had Edmond teach the technique, which became known as "le geste d'Edmond"—Edmond's gesture—to other slaves. Within a few decades, Réunion's vanilla production exploded, surpassing Mexico's. Vanilla went from being an exotic luxury to a staple in kitchens worldwide. Justine: That's an amazing story. But what’s almost more amazing is that we know his name. You’d think a discovery like that, made by a slave, would have been claimed by his owner or just lost to history. Rachel: And that's a central point Ashton makes. Ferréol's effort to credit Edmond was the exception, not the rule. Someone else, the director of the local botanical garden, later tried to claim he had invented the technique and taught it to Edmond. But Ferréol publicly defended Edmond's legacy. Still, Edmond's life was tragic. He was freed in 1848 but died in poverty. Justine: So, this story is the perfect example of Ashton's thesis. There was no 'genius' here in the mythical sense. Edmond wasn't a formally educated botanist. He was just a curious person who observed a problem closely and, through trial and error, found a solution. An ordinary act with an extraordinary outcome. Rachel: Exactly. It wasn't a leap of genius. It was a small, deliberate step. And Ashton argues that all creation, even the most complex, follows that same pattern.

Justine: Okay, the Edmond story is powerful, but it's a single, clever trick. What about something monumentally complex, like inventing the airplane? Surely that required a leap of genius from the Wright brothers? You can't just stumble into flight. Rachel: That's the common perception, but Ashton argues it’s completely wrong. The Wright brothers didn't have a single 'eureka' moment about flight. In fact, they succeeded precisely because they ignored the big, sexy problem everyone else was focused on. Justine: Which was what? Building a powerful enough engine? Rachel: Exactly. Everyone from Samuel Langley, who was backed by the Smithsonian and the US government, to other inventors in Europe, thought the key to flight was power. They were trying to build a massive engine and strap some wings to it. The Wrights, as bicycle makers, understood something different. They knew the real problem wasn't power; it was balance and control. Justine: That makes so much sense. It doesn't matter how fast you can pedal a bike if you can't steer it. Rachel: Precisely. Wilbur Wright said, "When this one feature has been worked out, the age of flying machines will have arrived, for all other difficulties are of minor importance." So they obsessed over control. They watched how birds twisted their wingtips to steer and came up with the idea of "wing warping." They built kite after glider, making tiny, incremental changes. Justine: So it was a process of constant iteration. Rachel: Yes, and here’s the most crucial part. When their early gliders didn't perform as expected based on the existing scientific data for aerodynamics, they didn't assume their design was wrong. They assumed the data was wrong. Justine: Hold on. They, two bicycle makers from Ohio, decided that all the established aerodynamic lift tables from the world's top scientists were incorrect? That takes some serious confidence. Rachel: It does. And they were right. So they built their own wind tunnel—a six-foot wooden box with a fan—and spent months testing hundreds of different wing shapes. They created their own, correct data. Their final 1903 Flyer wasn't a revolutionary leap; it was the result of hundreds of small problems identified and solved, one by one. They didn't invent a flying machine in one go. They solved the problem of lift, then the problem of control, then the problem of propulsion, step by painstaking step. Justine: It’s like that famous psychology experiment, Duncker's Candle Problem. Where you have to mount a candle on the wall with a box of tacks. Most people see the box only as a container for the tacks, not as a potential shelf. They have functional fixedness. The other inventors were fixated on the 'tacks'—the engine. The Wrights saw that the 'box'—the control system—was the real key to solving the problem. Rachel: That's a perfect analogy. They reframed the problem. Ashton's title, How to Fly a Horse, is a metaphor for this. The myth is that you need a magical, winged horse. The reality is that you solve a series of smaller, grounded problems until the horse, and you, are flying. It’s a process. Justine: A process that sounds like it involves an enormous amount of failure. I mean, for every successful wing shape they tested, how many failed? Rachel: Hundreds. And that brings us to what Ashton argues is the true, unglamorous core of creation: enduring the gauntlet of failure and rejection.

Justine: Right, because it's one thing to fail in your own workshop, but it's another thing entirely when the whole world is telling you you're wrong. That sounds exhausting. How do you keep going when everyone, even your peers, tells you you're a fool? Rachel: It's maybe the hardest part of creating anything new. And there's no better story to illustrate this than that of Dr. Judah Folkman. In the 1960s, Folkman, a surgeon, proposed a radical new theory for treating cancer. Justine: What was the theory? Rachel: He observed that tumors, to grow beyond a tiny size, needed to create their own blood supply. He called this process angiogenesis. His idea was revolutionary: instead of poisoning the cancer with chemotherapy, what if you could just cut off its blood supply and starve it to death? Justine: That sounds brilliant. A totally new angle of attack. The scientific community must have been thrilled. Rachel: They hated it. They ridiculed him. His papers were rejected. His grant applications were denied, with one reviewer calling his idea "an elaborate fantasy." He was a surgeon, and his colleagues saw him as dabbling in a field he didn't understand. The board of the hospital where he worked eventually cut his salary and forced him to stop performing surgery to focus on his "unproductive" research. Justine: That's brutal. He's proposing a potential cure for cancer, and his own institution punishes him for it. I can't even imagine the self-doubt. Rachel: For over two decades, he and his small team worked in isolation, facing failure after failure. They couldn't isolate the substance that was inhibiting blood vessel growth. A sign on his lab wall read: "Innovation is a series of repetitive failures." But he persisted. He was driven by what he had seen with his own eyes as a surgeon: tumors were red and bloody. He knew they needed a blood supply. Justine: So what was the turning point? Rachel: It was a combination of a lucky break—a fungus contaminating an experiment revealed an angiogenesis inhibitor—and decades of painstaking work. Finally, in the 1990s, his treatments started showing miraculous results in patients who had been given no other hope. The book tells the story of a five-year-old girl named Jennifer with a massive, life-threatening tumor on her face. After weeks of Folkman's experimental treatment, the tumor just... melted away. Justine: Wow. After all that rejection. He was finally vindicated. Rachel: Completely. And today, anti-angiogenesis drugs are a standard pillar of cancer therapy, used to treat millions. But it took nearly thirty years of being told he was wrong. Ashton's point is that this is the norm for transformative ideas. The world reflexively rejects the new. And the creator's job is not just to have the idea, but to have the endurance to see it through the long, dark winter of rejection.

Rachel: So when you put these stories together—Edmond, the Wrights, Folkman—you see the full picture Ashton is painting. Creation isn't an event; it's a process. It starts with an ordinary act of observation, not a flash of genius. It proceeds through a series of small, logical, often failing steps. And it survives only through a level of persistence that can look like madness to the outside world. Justine: It really reframes what we should admire. We celebrate the 'genius' of the final product, the successful flight or the cured patient. But maybe the real genius is in the process itself—the willingness to build your own wind tunnel when the books are wrong, or to keep going to the lab for twenty years when no one believes in you. Rachel: Exactly. The book argues that the most important thing creators do is work, and the most important thing they don't do is quit. It strips away the romance and leaves us with something much more powerful: a blueprint that anyone can follow. Justine: So what's the one thing someone listening can do today to start 'flying their own horse,' so to speak? If they have an idea, a project, a passion, but they feel stuck in that myth of waiting for inspiration? Rachel: Ashton’s advice is beautifully simple. Begin. Don't wait for the perfect idea. Don't worry about the first draft being brilliant. In fact, assume it will be bad. The only bad draft is the one you do not write. Creation is selection, and you can't select from nothing. Justine: I love that. It’s permission to be imperfect. Just start, make something, and then you have something to improve. It’s a step, not a leap. Rachel: It’s a step. And if you take enough of them, you might just end up somewhere extraordinary. Justine: This is Aibrary, signing off.