Narrator: In 1841, on the remote island of Réunion, a French colonist named Ferréol Bellier-Beaumont was staring at a twenty-year-old problem. His vanilla vine, a plant native to Mexico, grew beautifully but never produced a single valuable bean. Without its natural pollinator, a specific species of bee, the orchid was barren. One morning, he discovered two green vanilla pods hanging from the vine. Stunned, he asked who had done it. A twelve-year-old slave boy named Edmond Albius stepped forward, claiming he had pollinated the flower himself. Using a sliver of bamboo, Edmond demonstrated his simple but revolutionary technique, a gesture that would unlock vanilla production worldwide and transform the spice from a rare luxury into a global commodity. Yet, for his world-changing creation, Edmond died in poverty, his story almost lost to history. How could such a monumental discovery come from such an unlikely source, and why do we so rarely hear these stories?

In his book, How to Fly a Horse, Kevin Ashton dismantles the pervasive myth of creative genius, arguing that creation is not a magical act reserved for a special few. Instead, it is a fundamentally human process of ordinary work, incremental steps, and persistent failure—a process available to everyone.

Narrator: The popular narrative of creation is one of divine inspiration and singular, heroic figures. We imagine Archimedes leaping from his bath or Newton being struck by an apple. Ashton argues this is a dangerous and misleading myth. The reality is that creation is the result of ordinary acts, accumulated over time. The story of Edmond Albius is a powerful testament to this. Edmond was not a recognized genius; he was an enslaved child with a curious mind who, through observation and simple experimentation, solved a problem that had stumped botanists for decades. His discovery, le geste d’Edmond, was not a flash of brilliance but the application of knowledge to a specific problem.

This idea is supported by a broader look at history. The concept of authorship and inventorship is relatively new. For centuries, credit was attributed to authority or divine right, not individual creators. However, data from recent centuries shows a dramatic increase in the number of people receiving patents, copyrights, and scientific recognition. In 1800, about one in 175,000 Americans received a first patent; by 2000, that number was one in 4,000. This explosion doesn't suggest a sudden surge in human genius. Rather, it shows that as more people gain the opportunity, more people create. Ashton’s central argument is that creating is not an extraordinary phenomenon. As he puts it, "Creation is human. It is all of us. It is everybody."

Narrator: The myth of genius is often accompanied by the myth of the "eureka!" moment—a single, brilliant leap of insight that changes everything. Ashton systematically debunks this, showing that significant breakthroughs are almost always the result of a long series of small, incremental steps. The invention of the airplane by the Wright brothers serves as a perfect example. They were not the first to dream of flying, but they succeeded where others failed because they rejected the idea of a single, grand solution.

While other inventors focused on building powerful engines, the Wrights, bicycle makers by trade, understood that the real problem was control. Inspired by the way birds twisted their wings to maintain balance, they developed a concept called "wing warping." They didn't just build a plane; they built and tested kites, then gliders, constantly iterating and gathering data. They even built their own wind tunnel because they found that existing scientific data was wrong. Their first flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903 was not a sudden leap but the culmination of thousands of small steps, failures, and refinements. This process—find a problem, solve it, and repeat—is the true engine of creation, whether in engineering, art, or science. As Ashton concludes, creating is about taking steps, not making leaps.

Narrator: If creation is a process of taking many small steps, it follows that many of those steps will be in the wrong direction. Ashton argues that failure is not just a possible outcome of the creative process; it is an essential and productive part of it. The story of scientist Judah Folkman is a profound illustration of this principle. In the 1960s, Folkman proposed a radical theory: that cancerous tumors grow by creating their own blood supply, a process called angiogenesis. He suggested that cutting off this blood supply could starve the tumor.

For this idea, he was ridiculed. For over two decades, his papers were rejected, his grant applications were denied, and he was ostracized by the scientific community. A sign on his lab wall read, "Innovation is a series of repetitive failures." Yet Folkman persisted, driven by his observations and a belief in his idea. He and his team endured countless failed experiments. Finally, in 1985, a researcher in his lab made a serendipitous discovery involving a fungus that inhibited blood vessel growth. This breakthrough eventually led to life-saving cancer treatments. Folkman’s story shows that tenacity in the face of failure is what separates a dead end from a breakthrough. The most important thing creators do is work, and the most important thing they don’t do is quit.

Narrator: Why do so many creators, like Judah Folkman or Ignaz Semmelweis before him, face such intense rejection? Ashton explains that our brains are wired to resist the new. We suffer from "inattentional blindness"—a tendency to not see what we are not looking for. Expertise, while valuable, can actually worsen this effect by narrowing our focus. The discovery of the bacterium H. pylori by Robin Warren is a case in point. For a century, the established medical paradigm was that the stomach's acidic environment was sterile.

In 1979, Warren, a pathologist in Australia, kept noticing small, curved bacteria in stomach biopsies from patients with ulcers. His colleagues dismissed his findings; they couldn't be bacteria because bacteria couldn't live there. Yet Warren trusted his eyes over the textbooks. It took years of persistence and a collaboration with Barry Marshall to finally prove that H. pylori was the primary cause of most ulcers, a discovery that won them the Nobel Prize. For over 100 years, other scientists had seen the same bacteria in their own samples but had dismissed it as contamination or an anomaly because it didn't fit their paradigm. Creation, Ashton argues, requires a "beginner's mind," or shoshin—the ability to see without assumption and notice what everyone else has been trained to overlook.

Narrator: The final myth the book dismantles is that of the individual creator. Every invention, every work of art, and every scientific discovery is built upon a vast foundation laid by others. Ashton traces the famous quote, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants," from Isaac Newton back through centuries of thinkers to a 12th-century philosopher, showing that even this idea of inheritance was itself inherited. We see further not because of a few "giants," but because of the accumulated work of generations.

This collective reality is often marred by human bias. The story of Rosalind Franklin is a tragic example. Her work in X-ray crystallography, especially her famous "Photo 51," was a critical piece of evidence in determining the double-helix structure of DNA. However, her data was shown to James Watson and Francis Crick without her knowledge or consent. They used it to build their Nobel Prize-winning model, while Franklin's contribution was relegated to a footnote. This story exemplifies the "Matthew effect," where more-recognized scientists (in this case, men in a male-dominated field) get disproportionate credit. Creation is a collaborative process, but the distribution of its rewards is often unjust, shaped by power, prejudice, and politics.

Narrator: Ultimately, How to Fly a Horse delivers a powerful and liberating message: creation is not an exclusive club. It is a fundamental human capacity, a process of dedicated work, iterative problem-solving, and relentless perseverance. The book’s most important takeaway is that the power to create lies not in a stroke of genius but in the choice to begin and the refusal to quit.

The most challenging idea Ashton leaves us with is one of responsibility. If creating is an ordinary, accessible process, then the excuses we make—that we lack time, talent, or a magical spark—fall away. We are all inheritors of a world built by countless creators before us, and we are all capable of contributing to its future. The question, then, is not whether you can create, but what problem, big or small, will you choose to solve first?