BOOK REPORT: MESSY BY TIM HARFORD

INTRODUCTION

How German teen’s failure to get the right piano for a jazz concert turns into magic in a bottle thanks to the willingness and skill of Keith Jarrett to play within the limits of the instrument, recorded for posterity as the Köln Concert of 1975

Argument: sometimes we are better served by embracing a degree of mess instead of a tidy-minded approach 

“I will stand up for messiness not because I think messiness is the answer to all life’s problems, but because I think messiness has too few defenders. I want to convince you that there can sometimes be a certain magic in mess.”

CREATIVITY

Brian Eno, West Berlin music studio 1976

Oblique Strategy Cards 

Shuffle and deal (don’t pick and choose)

Takes you out of your comfort zone

eg Be the first not to do what has never not been done before, Emphasize the flaws, Only a part not the whole, twist the spine, look at the order in which you do things, change instrument roles, Water, Honor thy error as a hidden intention, think like a gardener

NP-hard problem in mathematics

Like a combination lock: given a solution, it’s easy to check if it works. Finding the solution is near impossible because you have to try every possible combination

Algorithms serve as recipes to work through possibilities

Randomness “simulated annealing”

Graeme Obree “The Flying Scotsman”, 1990s

Cyclist with random experimentations

Big gains until Union Cycliste Internationale banned this new ideass. Since then, only “marginal gains” have been possible

2014 London commuter strike

1/20 did not return to their habitual route. The unexpected forced them to a better route

Harvard test, Shelley Carson

Distractable brains have an innate tendency to allow creativity

Bernice Eiduson, 1958, scientists who switched topics frequently were more highly productive

Alexander Fleming/Louis Pasteur vs James Watson/Jonas Salk

Michael Crichton 1994

most successful novel (Disclosure), TV show (ER), movie (Jurassic Park)

Creativity researchers 

Keith Sawyer/Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

“Flow”

Howard Gruber and Sara Davis

Pattern of different projects at different stages of fruition - “network of enterprises”

Four clear benefits:

Knowledge cross-fertilization amongst projects

Fresh content is exciting

Subconscious processing of other projects while paying close attention to another

Escape from the others (Soren Kierkegaard refers to this as “crop rotation”)

Twyla Tharp choreographer

Keeps a box for each project

“One of the biggest fears for a creative person is that some brilliant idea will get lost because you didn’t write it down and put it in a safe place” I don’t worry about that because I know where to find it. It’s all in the box.”