By Scott Berkun
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Table of Contents

Chapter 1: The myth of epiphany

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While waiting in the lobby of Google's main building, I snuck into the back of a tour group heading inside. These outsiders, a mix of executives and business managers, had the giddy looks of kids in a candy factory—their twinkling eyes lost in Google's efforts to make a creative workplace. My clandestine activities unnoticed, we strolled together under the high ceilings and bright-colored open spaces designed to encourage inventiveness. No room or walkway was free of beanbag chairs, Ping-Pong tables, laptops, and Nerf toys, and we saw an endless clutter of shared games, brain-teasing puzzles, and customized tech gadgetry. The vibe was a happy blend of MIT's Media lab, the Fortune 500, and an eccentrically architected private library, with young, smart, smiley people lingering just about everywhere. To those innocents on the tour, perhaps scarred survivors of cubicle careers, the sights at Google were mystical—a working wonderland. And their newfound Google buzz was the perfect cover for me to tag along, observing their responses to this particular approach to the world of ideas (see ).

Figure 1-1: One of the creative interiors of Google's main campus in Mountain View, California.

The tour offered fun facts about life at Google, like the free organic lunches in the cafeteria and power outlets for laptops in curious places (stairwells, for example), expenses taken to ensure Googlers are free, at all times, to find their best ideas. While I wondered whether Beethoven or Hemingway, great minds noted for thriving on conflict, could survive such a nurturing environment without going postal, my attention was drawn to questions from the tourists. A young professional woman, barely containing her embarrassment, asked, "Where is the search engine? Are we going to see it?" to which only half the group laughed. (There is no singular "engine"—only endless dull bays of server computers running the search-engine software.)

The second question, though spoken in private, struck home. A thirty-something man turned to his tour buddy, leaning in close to whisper. I strained at the limits of trying to hear without looking like I was eavesdropping. He pointed to the young programmers in the distance, and then, behind a cupped hand, he wondered, "I see them talking and typing, but when do they come up with their ideas?" His buddy stood tall and looked around, as if to discover something he'd missed: a secret passageway, epiphany machines, or perhaps a circle of black-robed geniuses casting idea spells. Finding nothing, he shrugged. They sighed, the tour moved on, and I escaped to consider my observations.

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Ideas never stand alone

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The computer keyboard I'm typing on now involves dozens of ideas and inventions. It's comprised of the typewriter, electricity, plastics, written language, operating systems, circuits, USB connectors, and binary data. If you eliminated any of these things from the history of the universe, the keyboard in front of me (as well as the book in front of you) would disappear. The keyboard, like all innovations, is a combination of things that existed before. The combination might be novel, or used in an original way, but the materials and ideas all existed in some form somewhere before the first keyboard was made. Similar games can be played with cell phones (telephones, computers, and radio waves), fluorescent lights (electric power, advanced glass moldings, and some basic chemistry), and GPS navigation (space flight, high-speed networks, atomic clocks). Any seemingly grand idea can be divided into an infinite series of smaller, previously known ideas.

Similar patterns exist in the work of innovation itself. For most, there is no singular magic moment; instead, there are many smaller insights accumulated over time. The Internet required nearly 40 years of innovations in electronics, networking, and packet-switching software before it even approximated the system Tim Berners-Lee used to create the World Wide Web. The refrigerator, the laser, and the dishwasher were disasters as products for decades before enough of the barriers—cultural and technological—were eliminated, each through insights of various kinds, to make them into true business innovations. Big thoughts are fun to romanticize, but it's many small insights coming together that bring big ideas into the world.

However, it's often not until people try their own hands at innovation or entrepreneurship that they see past the romance and recognize the challenges for what they are. It's easy to read shallow, mythologized accounts of what Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Edison, or Jeff Bezos did, and make the mistake of mimicking their behavior in an entirely different set of circumstances (or with comparatively modest intellects). The myths are so strong that it's a surprise to many to learn that having one big idea isn't enough to succeed. Instead of wanting to innovate, a process demanding hard work and many ideas, most want to have innovated. The myth of epiphany tempts us to believe that the magic moment is the grand catalyst; however, all evidence points to its more supportive role.

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Chapter 2: We understand the history of innovation

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History is written by those who win and those who dominate.

—Edward Said

History is the lie commonly agreed upon.

—Voltaire

History is a damn dim candle over a damn dark abyss.

—W. S. Holt

History is indeed the witness of the times, the light of truth.

—Cicero

In the Egyptian wing of London's British Museum, I hovered by the Rosetta Stone, waiting for the guards to look away. When a child stumbled over the corner of a lesser relic, distracting the guards, I moved in. Holding my breath, I reached over the steel barrier, stretched out my trembling hand, and ran it across the letters on the Stone. My fingertips gently stroked the cold surface, racing along ancient corners of mysterious symbols: in one motion, I touched more history than fills many men's dreams. With my hand back at my side, I strolled away, ashamed and thrilled, praying against alarms and handcuffs that never came. I didn't wash that hand all day, lost in imagining the important men behind the Stone (see ).

But when the thrill of my museum mischief faded, one frustration remained: the Stone is famous for reasons irrelevant to those who conceived it. The stonecutters could not have imagined their work in a European museum 2,000 years in the future, with hired guards protecting it from hooligans like me. Yet, there it sat, as if its destiny was to be found in a rubble pile by the French, used to decipher hieroglyphics, and, finally, displayed in its true resting place in London. In the solemn, shrine-like atmosphere of the museum, I'd forgotten that the stone is an artifact: it's an object that was part of history but not history itself.

Figure 2-1: The Rosetta Stone at the British Museum, circa 1996.

Although the Stone is a more of a discovery than an invention, this gap between how the stonemakers saw their work and how we see it today is meaningful to innovators. To understand innovations as they happen, we need to see how history changes perceptions and re-examine events like the discovery of the Rosetta Stone.

Weighing nearly 2,000 pounds, the Stone is a fragment of an Egyptian pillar created in 196 BCE. In its time, the Stone was ordinary, one of many used by pharaohs to communicate with their people. The message on the Stone—the rarely mentioned reason it was made—is a public service announcement, mostly praising the pharaoh ("the new king, great in glory, the stabilizer of Egypt, pious in matters of gods, superior to his adversaries…"). The Stone is of minor interest save two facts:

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Why does history seem perfect?

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If you take a walk in 21st-century Rome, it's obvious that Romans were masterful builders. There are coliseums (see ), temples, baths, and aqueducts thousands of years old, still standing (and in many cases still working). The problem is that we're biased by what we can't see. These buildings are the minority of what the Romans made: the others fell down or were built over, buried, or in some cases torn apart for materials used in other buildings and are thus lost to history. While the Romans deserve praise for their engineering prowess, they were not perfect engineers—they made mistakes all the time. Their ruling class did live in the glorious marble structures often shown in movies, but most Romans lived in collapse-prone tenements that killed thousands.

Figure 2-2: The ever-sturdy Roman Coliseum, built over the remains of Emperor Nero's Golden House after the fire.

Despite the wonderful domes and legendary straight roads, the great fire of Rome in 64 CE burned down two-thirds of the city, including the 800-year-old Temple of Jupiter and the Atrium Vestae, the most sacred shrine in the Roman Forum. This means that most of Rome we know today, ruins included, was built to replace the one that burned to the ground.

The lesson I'm hinting at is larger than Rome: examine any legend of innovation, from inventors to scientists to engineers, and you'll find similar natural omissions by history. History can't give attention to what's been lost, hidden, or deliberately buried; it is mostly a telling of success, not the partial failures that enabled success. Without at least imagining the missing dimensions to the stories, our view of how to make things happen in the present is seriously compromised.

Recent history has similar problems. Most Americans are taught that Columbus was a hero who navigated dangerous seas to discover the place we call home, who fought for the supposedly innovative belief that the world was round. (This is a bizarre myth because sailors since ancient times knew the world was a sphere— the question was how large. ) But reading Howard Zinn's

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Evolution and innovation

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The Rosetta Stone sat buried in the sand, forgotten and unloved, for nearly 2,000 years. There were no markers or maps that led Napoleon's army to find it on that day in July. There was plenty of time for someone else to destroy, deface, chop it into pretty sculptures, or hide it where it could never be found. Of course, we're fortunate that events turned out as they did, but back then, when the past was the present, there was every possibility for it to turn out differently. The discovery of the Rosetta Stone was not inevitable.

Yet, when we look at any history timeline, we're encouraged to believe, by their omission, that other outcomes were impossible. Because the events on timelines happened, regardless of how bizarre or unlikely, we treat them today as preordained. It's not our fault, and it's not the fault of timeline makers (as that's a tough job). The simple fact is that these simplifications make history easier to explain. That said, it's also deceptive: at every point in every timeline in every book that will ever be published, there was as much uncertainty and possibility for change as there is today.

Consider how technology is taught in ages: first there was stone, then bronze, then iron; or, in the computer world, it's the ages of mainframes, personal computers, and the Internet. We label periods of time around discoveries/inventions, projecting onto the past an orderly map to what was, normal, average, everyday confusion. The earlier adopters of bronze swords, chasing the wooden-spear-wielding masses away from their treasures, didn't see themselves as being in the "Bronze Age" any more than the first Macintosh users saw themselves as being in the "pre-Internet Age" or than we see ourselves as being in the "age before telepathy was cheap and fun" (or whatever amazing thing happens next). Like in the present, people in the past believed they had divorced themselves from history and were living on the edge of the future in a crazy place called now.

This leads to the divisive question, the terrifying test of awareness of innovation history: were the innovations of the past inevitable? Are the Internet, the automobile, and the cell phone the necessary and unavoidable conclusion of human invention up until this time? Many think so. The idea even has the fancy name

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Chapter 3: There is a method for innovation

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By definition innovation is a charge into the unknown.

—Unknown

Every Tuesday morning, Mr. K., my chemistry teacher, stumbled into the high school science lab, unlocked the chemistry cabinet, and built the most destructive science experiments known to man. He would repeat these pyrotechnic feats, ignoring scorched desks and terrified students, until he passed out or ran out of ammunition. After demanding that we replicate his chemical prowess, he'd storm out of the room, rarely seen until the following week. I haven't lost my fear of Bunsen burners and glass vials, but I remember one concept important to all innovative pursuits that those experiments etched into my mind: methodology (see ).

Figure 3-1: A science teacher demonstrating the concept of methodology.

A method, as defined by the American Heritage Dictionary, is a systematic way of accomplishing something. I deduced from Mr. K.'s behavior in class that no matter how late a person was out on a given night, or how many bars he visited before sleeping in his car, if he faithfully followed the methodological formulas of chemistry, he could achieve the same results repeatedly without risk. Despite threats to the contrary, no students were ever harmed in his presence. The immutable laws of science, Mr. K. proclaimed, are all powerful, as they have a consistency beyond everything known to man.

But life is larger than science. What we want in life is more complex than what can be achieved by mixing smelly powders or dropping Mentos into large bottles of Diet Coke (do try this, but do it outside). And unlike school assignments, we don't want the same results every time. To innovate is to make something new, and progressive science—the discovery of knowledge—is a far cry from what went on in Mr. K.'s classroom. A true experiment has at least one variable that is unknown, and the experiment is to see how that variable, well, varies. What happens if you juggle magnetized bowling balls under water or deep fry a sack of Twinkies in space? If no one knows for certain, you have an experiment on your hands.

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How innovations start

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The top question famed innovators hear is, "How did you start?" It's the beginnings that drive our curiosity: when did Edison get the idea for the lightbulb, or how did the Google founders envision a better search engine? Everyone wants to know where the magic happened, and since they can't imagine the magic sprinkled across years of work, they assume it's a secret—a tangible, singular element hiding behind the start. Like our endless quest to explain the origins of things, we're prone to seeking magic in beginnings.

It's this desire that leads otherwise bright minds to research Michael Jordan's breakfast, da Vinci's or Einstein's napping habits, or Linus Torvalds' (founder of Linux) chosen style of underwear. The irrelevance of these details is obvious here in the logical confines of this book, but we've all considered similarly ridiculous questions about someone we admire. I once researched which typewriter Hemingway had and which inks Shakespeare used to pen his plays. Dreams don't run on logic: when we follow our emotions, we find both amazing and ridiculous things, and it takes time to sort one from the other.

The eventual problem with excessive, dreamy curiosity is that— instead of making our own beginnings, right here and now—we seek to reuse others' magic, borrowing their beginnings, retrofitting them into our lives. Of course, still safe in this book, we know details from others' experiences are unlikely to be pivotal in our own—what worked for them, during their era, won't necessarily work for anyone else. For example, imagine that Alexander the Great was born in Iceland or Steve Jobs in medieval France— how well would their "magic" work? There are countless factors in any success story, and only some belong to the innovators.

Bo Peabody, venture capitalist and founder of Tripod (the eighth largest web site in 1998) wrote, "Luck is a part of life, and everybody, at one point or another, gets lucky. But luck is a big part of business life and perhaps the biggest part of entrepreneurial life." Acknowledging the uncontrollable factors helps divorce us from worshiping the details of heroes' achievements. Studying history grants power, but only when we overcome romance and see innovators as humans just like us with similar limitations and circumstantial influences.

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The challenges of innovation

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Steve Jobs, founder of Apple and Pixar, was asked, "How do you systematize innovation?" (a common question among CEOs and the business community). His answer was, "You don't." This was not what readers of Business Week expected to hear, but foolish questions often receive disappointing answers. It's as absurd a question as asking how to control weather or herd cats, because those approximate the lack of control and number of variables inherent in innovation. Jobs, or any CEO, might have a system for trying to manage innovation, or a strategy for managing the risks of new ideas, but that's a far cry from systematizing something. I wouldn't call anything with a 50% failure rate a system, would you? The Boeing 777 has jet engines engineered for guaranteed 99.99% reliability—now that's a system and a methodology. It's true that innovation is riskier than engineering, but that doesn't mean we should use words like system, control, or process so casually.

A better question, one with useful answers, is: what challenges do innovations face? While success is unpredictable, the challenges can be identified and used as excellent tools. Any successful innovation can be studied for how those challenges were overcome, and any innovation in progress can be managed with those challenges in mind.

In this chapter's second swoop through the innovations of all time, I've categorized the eight challenges innovations confront.

1. Find an idea. Ideas can come from anywhere: concentrated thinking, daydreaming, personal problems, observations of others, a coincidence, or the result of studying something in the world (see ). The idea could be for a problem you want to solve or merely for an experiment you want to follow (hoping the problem it solves will surface later—a scenario often mocked as a "solution in search of a problem").
2. Develop a solution. The idea is one thing; a working solution is another. Leonardo da Vinci sketched a helicopter in the 1500s, but it would be centuries before developments in aerodynamics and engines would make even a working prototype possible. Execution demands more effort than idea generation, and it's difficult to know how much more until you try. When developing something new, technologies, bank accounts, and people all have a surprising tendency to disappoint, sending humbled innovators back for variations of challenge #1: many smaller ideas need to be found to enable the big idea. Or, the idea is narrowed to make development possible.

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The infinite paths of innovation

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The good news that arises from all of these challenges is that there are many ways to succeed. We're lucky: all the great things civilization has created did happen, despite all the reasons they didn't have to. However, which paths are open or closed at any moment is impossible to know. The path that worked last week is not guaranteed to work today, and an innovation that has failed in the past might just be the right thing for right now. Successful innovations are highly unpredictable, even in the view of experts or the innovator themselves, as is the case of three unlikely but telling success stories: 3M, Craigslist, and Flickr.

In the summer of 2002, a small team of Vancouver programmers were working to build an online game called Game Neverending. The idea was to build an experience so fun and interesting that people would pay money to spend time in this invented world (similar to today's popular and addictive World of Warcraft). One goal the programmers had was to make communication easy between people inside the game, easier even than being in the same room. They built a simple tool that allowed players to talk, exchange instant messages, and share photos. It was a minor part of a major project and, at the time, not much was thought of it.

As weeks passed, they realized the photo-sharing tool they'd built was a more promising business than the game itself. It was fun to use, and as it was improved, it developed features that even professional photo-sharing tools didn't have. With the game incomplete, and their 2002 post-boom tech-sector financing running thin, they strapped on their seatbelts and changed direction. In 2003, it launched under the name Flickr and quickly found a following. Since Flickr's design wasn't nurtured under the scrutiny of a business model, they delivered higher-quality service to customers with ideas none of the existing competitors had ever thought to do. As Fake, one of Flickr's founders, commented, "Had we sat down and said, 'Let's start a photo application,' we would have failed." Because they had the freedom to design a photo application without the same constraints, they were able to design something unique. While Flickr itself probably never made a profit, their technology, design, and loyal customers were attractive enough for Yahoo! to purchase them—even though Yahoo! had its own photo-sharing service.

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Finding paths of innovation

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While there are no maps, there are attitudes that help. Any good survival training course teaches not just skills, but ways to think. The comparison between innovation and survival is apt; to follow the comparison, here are ways of thinking about paths that can shift the odds.

• Self-knowledge. Every tough decision is made in part by how the innovator feels about herself: none of us is as logical as we like to believe. Being aware of the environments or challenges that inspire the best results for your personality helps you make smart path choices. The best business opportunity might be the least interesting personal challenge, and vice versa. Knowing yourself, and your team, is a big advantage and should guide decisions. It's one of the few uncertainties of innovation that, given time, can always be converted into certain knowledge and used as an asset.
• Be intense, but step back. Many successful innovators work passionately, but periodically step back and ask, "What is happening in the world that impacts my goals?" or "What else is my work good for?" Innovation is powered by the combination of intensity and a willingness to reconsider assumptions, minimizing the chance of following dead ends and maximizing the potential for finding better paths. Honest friends can lend their perspectives if asked—you just have to be ready to hear hard truths. It's difficult to bet years on an idea and maintain the courage to question, rethink, and fully commit again.
• Grow to size. No patent was written and filed in an hour, and no symphony was orchestrated overnight. Changing the world or revolutionizing an industry is a nice fantasy, but it's foolish to start with those ambitions because they're out of any individual's control. It makes more sense to attack a specific problem in a known field; only as successes accrue should the ambition grow. Many world-changing ideas had humble beginnings and started with small questions like, "Can I make this better?" Use ego and ambition to fuel a progression of innovations and not to distract you away from the best opportunities, however ordinary, nearby.

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Chapter 4: People love new ideas

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Imagine it's 1874, and you've just invented the telephone. After hi-fiving your friend Watson, you head down to Western Union— the greatest communication company in the world—and show your work. Despite your excellent pitch (a century before Power-Point), they turn you down on the spot, call the telephone a useless toy, and show you to the door. Would you have given up? What if the next five companies turned you down? The next 25? How long would it take to lose faith in your ideas?

Fortunately, Alexander Graham Bell, the telephone's inventor, didn't listen to the folks at Western Union. He started his own business and changed the world, paving the way for the mobile phone in your pocket. Similar stories surround innovators like Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, whose page rank ideas were turned down by AltaVista and Yahoo!, the dominant search companies of the day. George Lucas was told all kinds of no by every major Hollywood studio but one, for the original Star Wars screenplay. And, don't forget that Einstein's E=mc², Galileo's sun-centered solar system, and Darwin's theory of evolution were laughed at for years by experts around the world.

Every great idea in history has the fat red stamp of rejection on its face. It's hard to see today because once ideas gain acceptance, we gloss over the hard paths they took to get there. If you scratch any innovation's surface, you'll find the scars: they've been roughed up and thrashed around—by both the masses and leading minds— before they made it into your life. Paul C. Lauterbur, winner of the Nobel Prize for coinventing MRI, explained, "you can write the entire history of science in the last 50 years in terms of papers rejected by Science or Nature." Big ideas in all fields endure dismissals, mockeries, and persecutions (for them and their creators) on their way to changing the world. Many novels in classics libraries, including James Joyce's Ulysses, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye were banned upon publication; great minds like Socrates and Plato even rejected the idea of books at all.

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Managing the fears of innovation

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What's the most stressful thing that can happen? Juggling hungry cocaine-addicted baby tigers? Doing standup comedy in front of your coworkers and in-laws? Well, if you believe the studies, it's the big five: divorce, marriage, moving, death of a loved one, and getting fired. All stressful events, including tiger juggling, combine fear of suffering with forced change. A divorce or new job demands that your life change in ways out of your control, triggering instinctive fears: if you don't do something clever soon, you're going to be miserable (or dead). Although it's possible to endure the big five simultaneously, a notion that quiets most complaints about life, surviving just one devastates most people for months.

Now imagine some relaxing events: reading a funny novel by the ocean or having beers with friends by a midnight campfire. They're activities with little risk and guaranteed rewards. We've done these things many times and know that others have done them successfully and happily in the past. These are the moments we wish we had more of. We work hard so we can maximize the amount of time spent on the planet doing these kinds of things.

Innovation conflicts with this desire. It asks for faith in something unknown over something known to be safe, or even pleasant. A truly innovative Thanksgiving turkey recipe or highway driving technique cannot be risk-free. Whatever improvement it might yield is uncertain the moment it's first tried (or however many attempts are needed to get it right). No matter how amazing an idea is, until proven otherwise, its imagined benefits will pale in comparison to the real, and nonimagined, fear of change.

This creates an unfortunate paradox: the greater the potential of an idea, the harder it is to find anyone willing to try it (more on this in ). For example, solutions for world peace and world hunger might be out there, but human nature makes it difficult to attempt them. The bigger the changes needed to adopt an innovation, the more fears rise.

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries…and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it

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The list of negative things innovators hear

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Every creator hears similar criticisms to his ideas. While I don't have proof, I bet the first caveman who captured fire, the first Sumerian with a wheel, the first person to do anything interesting in any society in human history, heard one of the following after he pitched his idea:

• This well never work.
• No one will want this.
• It can't work in practice.
• People won't understand it.
• This isn't a problem.
• This is a problem, but no one cares.
• This is a problem and people care, but it's already solved.
• This is a problem, and people care, but it will never make money.
• This is a solution in search of a problem.
• Get out of my office/cave now.

Sometimes very smart people say these things. Ken Olsen, founder of the Digital Equipment Corporation, said in 1977, "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." The leading art critics in France, in response to the opening of the Eiffel Tower, made comments like, "[that] tragic lamppost springing up from its bowels…[is] like a beacon of disaster and despair." It took the British Navy, at the peak of their dominance in the 17th century, 150 years to adopt a proven remedy for scurvy. Bo Peabody, serial entrepreneur, wrote, "It's astounding the number of people who will tell you and your ideas are crazy. I have been thrown out of more than a thousand offices while building my six companies." Remember, it's hard to know the future, and all great minds have failed to predict what would take off and what wouldn't. My point isn't to make fun of famous people for being wrong; instead, it's to point out that we're all wrong much of the time (see ).

Figure 4-1: Many critics demanded that the Eiffel Tower be torn down when it was built. Today, it's one of Paris' most popular attractions.

Experienced innovators anticipate these criticisms. They prepare refutations or preempt them, as in, "Who would want electricity in their homes? Let me tell you who…" But even with preparation, charm, and amazing ideas, convincing people to see an idea in the same way as its creator is difficult. Most have little interest in having their minds changed, a fact that's hard to remember when you've spent your life savings, or an entire weekend, killing yourself to invent something. This gap—the difference between how an innovator sees his work from how it's seen by others—is the most frustrating challenge innovators face. Creators expect to be well received. They look at accepted innovations and the heroes who delivered them and assume their new innovations will be treated the same way (see ). But no matter how brilliant an idea is, the gap exists. Until the innovation is accepted, it will be questioned relentlessly.

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The innovator's dilemma explained

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Earlier, I asked you to imagine inventing the telephone. Did you like that? Well, you'll like this even more, as this scenario has a surprise ending.

Imagine it's 1851, and you're sick and tired of waiting for the Pony Express to deliver important messages. You happen to meet a Mr. Morse and buy into his idea for using copper wire to send instant messages over great distances. Your friends laugh, telling you to get a real job—wires are silly things for grown men to play with. At great financial risk, you build the first cross-country cables in the U.S., and it works, changing the world. Your organization thrives for years; the nation is communicating, for a price, over your cutting-edge digital communication network. Wealthy and famous, attractive people soon throw themselves and their money at you. But you're not finished: in a fit of innovation, you create the first stock ticker in 1866, give the nation its first standardized time service, and revolutionize the financial world with money transfers—allowing people to send cash thousands of miles across the country in seconds.

In the middle of your glory, as your rise to innovation fame reaches untold heights, a young man visits you. He holds an odd machine in his hands. He claims it will replace everything, especially all the things you've struggled all your life to build. He's young, arrogant, and dismissive of your achievements. How long would you listen before you threw a telegraph at him? Could you imagine, given all you'd built, that something as simple as his clunky wooden box would replace everything you know? Or would you have the guts to give up the innovations you'd made and put everything behind the unknown?

This challenge of mind is known as the innovator's dilemma. The face off between Western Union and Alexander Graham Bell (dramatized but roughly accurate in my telling) has been played out for centuries, with the captains of one aging innovation protecting their work from the threat of emerging ideas. The concept is well described in Clayton M. Christensen's book, The Innovator's Dilemma, which provides hearty business examples of faith in the past blinding smart people from the innovations of the future.

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Frustration + innovation = entrepreneurship?

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The last 30 years has seen an amazing wave of innovation at the intersection of technology and entrepreneurship. Companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, HP, and Yahoo! started as small groups who dismissed the well-worn path of convincing others and chose instead to realize ideas on their own. These start-up ventures were born at the frustration of failing to make innovation happen in larger, established businesses. Had the founders of these companies found positive responses from corporations, history might be different. Frustration with people in power is a perennial complaint among creative minds: Michelangelo and da Vinci were infuriated by their employers' limited ambitions and their peers' conservative natures in the same way creative people are today.

Innovators rarely find support within mainstream organizations, and the same stubbornness that drives them to work on problems others ignore gives them the strength necessary to work alone. This explains the natural bond between breakthrough thinkers and new companies; innovative entrepreneurs not only have the passion for new ideas, but they also have the conviction to make sacrifices that scare established companies.

The risks for an individual focusing 100% of his resources on a crazy idea are small: it's one life. But for an organization of 500 or 10,000 people, the risks of betting large on a new idea are high. Even if the idea pays off, the organization will be forced to change, causing fears and negative emotions to surface from everyone invested in the success of the previous big idea. Of course, some corporations are so large that they can take great risks: they can lose $20 million on an experiment and survive. But these efforts fail so often that it's possible that having less to lose works against innovation, compared to scrappy bootstrapped efforts led by people with everything at stake.

But as rosy as it sounds, the entrepreneur, whether she's wealthy or happy living on ramen noodles, must eventually convince one group of people—customers—of the merit of her ideas. And if she doesn't have enough money to support her new ideas, or her family refuses to eat canned chili for the third straight month, she'll need to convince a second group—investors. As far as we know, both groups are human beings (though some debate the DNA of venture capitalists) and have the same emotional responses listed above.

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How innovations gain adoption (the truth about ideas before their time)

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One frequent saying in innovation circles is "an idea ahead of its time." What a strange phrase. How can an idea be ahead of its time? How can anything be ahead of its time? It makes no sense. What people mean when they say this is one of two things: they think the idea is cool but not necessarily good, or they're trying to get you to buy it. But it's a lousy pitch. How often do the things we imagine from the future work out in the present? Personal rocketships? Cars that fly? Nuclear-powered everything? The odds of cool ideas from sci-fi movies gaining adoption are poor, and it's far from a compliment to have something labeled "ahead of its time." People don't slave away on insanely difficult work, sacrificing the pleasures of life, with the singular hope that, on their deathbeds, after everything they've done has been ignored, they will be told they were "ahead of their time." To be told your idea is ahead of its time is innovation pity, not praise.

But more importantly for us, this phrase exposes myths about how innovations do gain adoption in the world. First, it assumes technology progresses in a straight line (as covered in ). To be ahead of its time implies than an idea has a time, marked in red at the universal innovation headquarters, waiting for people to catch up to it: an entirely inaccurate, innovation-centric view of how people live.

In Diffusion of Innovations, Everett M. Rogers writes:

Many technologists think that advantageous innovations will sell themselves, that the obvious benefits of a new idea will be widely realized by potential adopters, and that the innovation will therefore diffuse rapidly. Unfortunately, this is very seldom the case. Most innovations in fact diffuse at a surprisingly slow rate.

The book takes an anthropological approach to innovation, suggesting that new ideas spread at speeds determined by psychology and sociology, not the abstract merits of those new ideas. This explains the mysteries of great innovations that fail and bad ideas that prevail—there are more significant factors than the ones inventors focus on. Technology prowess matters much less than we think in the diffusion of innovation.

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Chapter 5: The lone inventor

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Who invented the electric light? No, it wasn't Thomas Edison. Two lesser-known inventors, Humphrey Davy and Joseph Swan, both developed working electric lights well before Edison. Think Ford invented the automobile? Wrong again. Unfortunately, popular credit for major innovations isn't brokered by historians: it's driven by markets, circumstance, and popularity, forces not bound by accuracy. Often, even historians have trouble sorting it out. Here's what the U.S. Library of Congress has to say on the subject, specific to the automobile:

This question [who invented it] does not have a straightforward answer. The history of the automobile is very rich and dates back to the 15th century when Leonardo da Vinci was creating designs and models for transport vehicles. There are many different types of automobiles—steam, electric, and gasoline—as well as countless styles. Exactly who invented the automobile is a matter of opinion. If we had to give credit to one inventor, it would probably be Karl Benz from Germany. Many suggest that he created the first true automobile in 1885/1886.

If the librarians at the largest library in the world don't know, how could we? There are similar complexities surrounding most innovations, from the first steam engines to personal computers or even airplanes (no, it's not the Wright brothers ). As simple as it should be, innovation history is complicated. Most innovations are not the solid, tangible, independent things we imagine them to be. Each one is made up of threads and relationships that don't separate easily or yield simple answers.

For example, take the electric light. When Edison sat down to design the lightbulb, he was far from the first person to try. If several people were trying to make it work, who deserves the credit? Would it be enough to come up with the idea itself? Have a prototype? Would it matter how long the prototype stayed alight? How bright it burned? How many people witnessed it? How many bulbs were sold? Would it matter whether they cost $5,000,000 per bulb or weighed 500,000 pounds? Depending on which question is seen as most important, different names surface as the rightful owner of the title "inventor." However, as folks at the U.S. Library of Congress suggest, there is no guidebook: the rules change from innovation to innovation. While there is some guidance for resolving these issues, before we get to explore them, things get worse.

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The convenience of lone inventors

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The most common convenience is order of exposure. Most of the world first learned of the idea of electric lights and lightbulbs from Edison. No matter the actual history, in their knowledge, he was the deliverer of the idea. Even if the world later discovered that others had the idea first, or made working lightbulbs before him, it's natural that people would still remember and use the association with Edison. Whoever is most visible in bringing something new, even if it's only to us, will forever be associated with that thing. Ask any four-year-old who invented love, and odds are high she'll say, "my mom." If we've been exposed to only one source for something, how could we imagine others?

This tendency extends to the names of things. As a kid, I laughed when my grandparents called every refrigerator "Fridgidaire"— the first brand of consumer refrigerator in America (1919) —until I realized I often use brand names, such as Kleenex, Band-Aid, Ziploc, Frisbee, or Post-it Notes, as many people do, in similarly incorrect fashion. Since those were the names I first associated with their respective innovations (tissues, adhesive bandage strips, resealable bags, etc.), they stayed with me. Even though I now know some of them were not the first brand to exist, or when I'm aware I'm using a similar product made by a competitor, I often thoughtlessly use the wrong name.

Ford and Edison paid for marketing campaigns to promote their innovations, businesses, and themselves. As businessmen, they had every reason to promote their work in ways that suggested they deserved every last drop of credit. They became media darlings of their times, appearing in interviews and books, and benefiting— just as star CEOs of today—from the power of public attention. It became convenient for journalists to write in an Edison-or Fordcentric view because making the inventors star characters increased the public's interest in the news.

Innovators became easy heroes in America; people preferred to believe, and tell, positive stories about them rather than the less interesting, and more complicated, truths. Would anyone in 1917, during WWI, have cared to know that the Duryea brothers, and not Ford, started the first American car company? Or that Ford owed homage to Leonardo da Vinci, Karl Benz, and others with strange names from foreign lands? Those details, no matter how honest, painted a complex and less patriotic story, which writers on competitive deadlines avoided. The small oversights that were necessary to cram complex truths into simple hero-shaped tales were convenient and comfortable for everyone—from newspapers to journalists to readers and their heroes—and it still happens today.

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The challenge of simultaneous invention

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Have you ever arrived at a party or work to find that someone is wearing the same shirt, pants, or shoes as you? It's a curiosity of modern life that we convince ourselves our wardrobes are unique, despite selecting the items from department stores' racks filled with dozens of the same shirts, slacks, and blouses. An observant shopper watching the goings on at the mall can easily imagine someone—roughly her size—heading home with a similar outfit. Yet if she ever does meet her fashion doppelganger at a party or on the street, she is astonished: "How could she wear my wardrobe?" Once obtained, regardless of how or why, we take conceptual possession: "That shirt with those pants is my idea."

Fashion is a good metaphor for the problem of simultaneous inventorship: the situation when two or more people claim to have invented something. Like wardrobe collision, it seems improbable in the moment that two people could unintentionally invent the same thing around the same time; stepping back, it's easy to see why it happens. The invention of calculus, television, telephones, bicycles, motion pictures, MRI imaging, and automobiles all involve various kinds of simultaneous, overlapping, or disputed origins.

It's common because innovations demand prerequisite knowledge—inventing a new cocktail (e.g., The Berkun ) requires experience with different liquors, and creating a new dance step (e.g., The Edison) demands knowledge of choreography. This narrows the number of people who could create a particular innovation. Add the limited number of popular problems in any field, and suddenly the number of people chasing particular challenges isn't so large.

For example, there are only so many people today working on better word processors, photo-sharing web sites, or email applications. They go to the same industry events, read the same books, and see the same progress among mutual competitors—not to mention the shared experiences that come from being alive at the same time (and at a good time). In Creativity in Science, Dean Simonton explains:

Galileo became a great scientist only because he had the fortune of being born in Italy during the time when it became the center of scientific creativity. Similarly, Newton's creative genius could appear only because he lived in Great Britain when the center had shifted there from Italy. If Galileo and Newton had switched birth years without changing national origins, then neither would have secured a place in the annals of science

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The myth of the lone inventor

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Everyone knows that Neil Armstrong was the first person on the moon. But how many people helped him get there? Of course there was the rest of the crew: Buzz Aldrin and the oft-forgotten Michael Collins. Then, just like in the movies, there were the dozens of worried-looking mission-control staff on the ground, and notables like Van Braun—intellectual forces who drove the entire program. But what about the people who made the many complicated parts needed to construct Apollo 11? And what about the managers, designers, and planners who conceived the ideas, organized engineering teams, and coordinated years of work? The numbers add up fast. More than 500,000 people worked on the NASA effort to put a person on the moon. For Armstrong to succeed required contributions from an entire metropolis worth of people, not including the millions of taxpayers who paid the bills, and the president who challenged a nation to believe. Neil Armstrong is a household name only because his contribution was the most visible. However, the most visible contribution isn't necessarily the most significant.

The fact that we know the names Neil Armstrong, Leonardo da Vinci, or Frank Lloyd Wright is an innovation all its own. If you want to know who designed the Egyptian pyramids, the Roman Coliseum, or the Great Wall of China, you're out of luck: no one knows. It wasn't until the 1500s and the rise of the Renaissance that Western cultures grew comfortable acknowledging people's creative abilities and individual achievements (we covered this briefly in ). Arnold Pacey writes in The Maze of Ingenuity, "Creation had previously been thought of as the prerogative of god; now it was seen as activity in which mankind could share…." While the inventors of the compass, the sword, or the mechanical clock missed their chance to make the history books, most inventions since the Renaissance have been credited to one or more individuals. Until then it wasn't important or culturally acceptable to document who deserved credit for creativity.

This shift came with baggage: not everyone was allowed in the special "creative" club. The only people with creative license were geniuses, the Michelangelos and da Vincis, whose talents seemed to stretch beyond human limitations. The rest of us, ordinary as we are, were expected to happily extend our worship to include these superhumans. Yet, these people, for all their brilliance, rarely worked alone. They shared their meals, romances, and daily lives with others, from ordinary shopkeepers to honest craftsmen, who influenced them and their work in many ways. Raphael, Plato, and Edison all had apprentices (in fact, when they were young, they worked as apprentices to older masters). They studied the great works of their time and had significant aid from unnamed assistants in making their masterpieces. They also benefited from powerful friendships: da Vinci was a pal of Machiavelli; Michelangelo was childhood friends with Pope Clement (who, as an adult, would commission many great works from him).

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Stepping stones: the origins of spreadsheets and E=mc

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When new TVs or mobile phones sit on store shelves, they seem self-contained. The experience is designed to inspire awe: innovations are placed on shrine-like displays with no signs of their manufacturing; all finished, polished, and gift-wrapped in plastic; waiting to be taken home. But if you look under the cover of any innovation, the magic of self-containment fades. There are subinventions, subproducts, minor-breakthroughs, and parts and components, each with a story of their own. Every wondrous thing is comprised of many other wondrous things.

In The Engines of Our Ingenuity, John Lienhard writes:

The smallest component of any device, something so small as a screw, represents a long train of invention. Somebody conceived of a lever, someone else thought of a ramp, and another person dreamed up a circular staircase. The simple screw thread merges all of those ideas, and it followed all of them…each part represents a skein of invention, and the whole is a device that we would normally not see in the parts alone.

Mobile phones and DVD players have dozens of screws—not to mention transistors, chips, batteries, and software. Take any of those pieces, divide again, and there's even more innovation hiding inside. It's easy to forget that the innovations we use are comprised of a series of smaller innovations. However, making new things requires taking apart other things and learning from the pieces. Sometimes inventors even work the other way, developing breakthroughs by deliberately experimenting with existing innovations.

The first killer app, the software that legitimized personal computers, was the spreadsheet. Before VisiCalc was released for the Apple II in 1978, most of the world did budgets, accounting, and business planning on paper. VisiCalc was the reason computers shifted from geek toys to mainstream business problem-solving tools. Dan Bricklin, one of the creators of VisiCalc, developed the idea while pursuing an MBA at Harvard. In his mind, the birth of VisiCalc came from a combination of existing ideas (count the previous innovations he mentions in this short passage):

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Chapter 6: Good ideas are hard to find

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While waiting in a city park to interview someone for this book, a nearby child played with Silly Putty and Legos at the same time. In my notepad I listed how many ideas the young boy, not more than five years old, came up with in 10 minutes. Sitting in the grass, he combined, modified, enhanced, tore apart, chewed on, licked, and buried various creations I'd never have imagined. His young mother, chatting on a phone while resting her morning coffee on the park bench, barely noticed the inventive creations her toddler unleashed on the world. After being chased away for making her nervous (an occupational risk of writers in parks), I wondered what happens to us, and what will happen to this boy, in adulthood. Why, as is popularly believed, do our creativity abilities decline, making ideas harder to find? Why aren't our conference rooms and board meetings as vibrant as childhood playgrounds and sandboxes?

If you ask psychologists and creativity researchers, they'll tell you that it's a myth: humans, young and old, are built for creative thinking. We've yet to find special creativity brain cells that die when you hit 35, or special hidden organs born only to the gifted that pass ideas to our minds. Many experts even discount genius, claiming that the amazing creations by Mozart or Picasso, for example, created their amazing works through ordinary means, exercising similar thinking processes to what we use to escape shopping mall parking lot mazes or improvise excuses when late for dinner. Much like children, the people who earn the label creative are, as Howard Gardner explains in Frames of Mind, "not bothered by inconsistencies, departures from convention, non-literalness…", and run with unusual ideas that most adults are too rigid, too arrogant, or too afraid to entertain.

The difference between creatives and others is more attitude and experience than nature. We survived hundreds of thousands of years not because of our sharp claws, teleportive talents, or regenerative limbs, but because our oversized brains adapt, adopt, and make use of what we have. If we weren't naturally creative and couldn't find ideas, humans would have died out long ago. A sufficiently motivated bear or lion can easily kill any man—even the scariest, meanest, all-pro NFL linebacker. However, given creative problems to solve, an average human being is hard to beat. We make tools, split atoms, and have more patents than the world's species' combined (but please don't tell the bears—they get pissy about patents). Our unique advantage on this planet is the inventive capacity of our minds. We even make tools for thought, like writing, so that when we find good ideas—such as how to tame and cage lions—we can pass that knowledge to future generations, giving them a head start.

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The dangerous life of ideas

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Quick test: Name five new ways to change the world, or you will die!

Sorry, time's up. Fortunately, I can't kill anyone from this side of the book, and writers killing readers is bad business. But if I did honor the threat, you'd be dead. No one can come up with one big idea, much less five, that fast. As absurd as this paragraph is so far, it mirrors how adults often manage creative thinking: "be creative, and perfect, right now." Whenever ideas are needed because of a crisis or a change, there's a fire-drill call, an immediate demand. But rarely is the call met with sufficient resources— namely time—to mine those ideas. The bigger the challenge, the more time it will take to find ideas, but few remember this when criticizing ideas to death moments after they've been born.

Cynical idea-killing phrases like, "that never works," "we don't do that here," or "we tried that already" are common (see "The list of negative things innovators hear" in ) and can easily make idea finding environments more like slaughterhouses than gardens. It's as if an idea knocks on the door, and someone answers waving an Uzi: "Go away! I'm looking for ideas." Ideas need nurturing and are grown, not manufactured, which suggests that idea shortages are self-inflicted. It doesn't take a genius to recognize that ideas will always be easier to find if they're not shot down on sight.

The myth that leads to this idea-destroying behavior is that good ideas will look the part when found. When Henry Ford made his first automobiles—awkward, smelly machines that stalled, broke down, and failed even the most generous comparisons to horses— people judged the superficial aspects, not the potential (see ). Everyone believes the future will come all at once in a neatly gift-wrapped package, as if Horse 2.0, whatever its incarnation, would make its first appearance with trumpets blaring and angels hovering above. The future never enters the present as a finished product, but that doesn't stop people from expecting it to arrive that way.

The idea of the computer mouse (see ) was equivalently weird and uninspiring to pre-PC age eyes ("Wow, a block of wood on a cord! The future is here!"). Evaluating new ideas flat out against the status quo is pointless. New ideas demand new perspectives, and it takes time to understand, much less judge, a point of view. Flip a world map or this book upside down, and at first it will feel bizarre. But wait. Observe for a few moments, and soon the new perspective will become comprehendible and possibly useful. However, that bizarre initial feeling tells you nothing about the value of the idea—it's an artifact of newness, not goodness or badness. This means using statements like "this hasn't been done before" or "that's too weird" alone to kill ideas is creative suicide: no new idea can pass that bar (see the upcoming sidebar "Idea killers").

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How to find good ideas

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To open minds and find good ideas, return to the kid in the park. What is it about his attitude that allows fearless idea exploration? Linus Pauling, the only winner of two solo Nobel Prize awards in history, had this to say about finding ideas: "The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas." This sounds idiotic to most ears because it cuts against the systematic, formulaic, efficiency-centric perspective worshiped in schools and professions. It seems wasteful to follow Pauling's advice. Can't we just skip to the good ideas? Optimize the process? Memorize a formula to plug stuff into? Well, you can't.

Figure 6-2: The superficials of innovation are rarely impressive. This is a version of the first computer mouse.

The dirty little secret—the fact often denied—is that unlike the mythical epiphany, real creation is sloppy. Discovery is messy; exploration is dangerous. No one knows what he's going to get when he's being creative. Filmmakers, painters, inventors, and entrepreneurs describe their work as a search: they explore the unknown hoping to find new things worth bringing to the world. And just like other kinds of explorers, the search for ideas demands risk: much of what's found won't be satisfactory. Therefore, creative work cannot fit neatly into plans, budgets, and schedules. Magellan, Lewis and Clark, and Captain Kirk were all sent on missions into the unknown with clear understanding that they might not return with anything, or even return at all.

The lives of well-known creative thinkers are filled with compulsions for playing with ideas: they wanted wide landscapes to explore. Beethoven obsessively documented every idea he had, madly scribbling them on tree trunks or on the manuscript paper he had jammed into his clothing, even interrupting meals and conversations to scratch them down. Ted Hoff, the inventor of the first microprocessor (Intel 4004) used to tell his team that ideas were a dime a dozen, encouraging them not to obsess or fixate on any particular one until a wide range of ideas had been explored. Hemingway made dozens of rewrites and drafts, cha