How to Fly a Horse

**Author:** Kevin Ashton

**Estimated Reading Time:** 45 minutes

**What You'll Learn:** Why the myth of creative genius is wrong, how ordinary people produce extraordinary work, and the step-by-step process behind every human creation.

**Who This Book Is For:** Anyone who has ever believed they are not creative, anyone who wants to understand how innovation actually happens, and anyone who leads teams or organizations that need to solve problems.

There is a story we tell ourselves about creativity. It goes something like this: a lone genius, blessed with a gift the rest of us lack, experiences a sudden flash of insight. Lightning strikes. The answer appears fully formed. The world changes overnight. This story is comforting because it explains why most of us do not create. If creativity belongs to the rare few, then our own lack of invention is not a failure. It is simply the natural order of things. We are not Mozarts. We are not Einsteins. We are not Steve Jobs. And so we are excused from the hard work of making something new. Kevin Ashton wrote How to Fly a Horse to dismantle this story completely. Ashton is not an academic theorist. He is a technology pioneer who coined the term "Internet of Things" and co-founded the Auto-ID Center at MIT. He has spent his career inside rooms where real things get built. And what he observed in those rooms contradicted everything popular culture teaches about creativity. The truth, Ashton argues, is that creation is ordinary. It is not the province of geniuses. It is the daily work of human beings. Every person who has ever solved a problem, fixed a machine, written a sentence, cooked a meal, or figured out a better way to do something has engaged in creation. The results may sometimes be extraordinary. The process never is. This matters because the myth of genius is not harmless. It is actively destructive. It discourages people from trying. It causes organizations to wait for brilliant individuals instead of building systems that enable ordinary people to do great work. It distorts our understanding of history, hiding the collaborative, incremental nature of every major human achievement. And it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy: because we believe creativity is rare, we fail to cultivate it in ourselves and others, and so it becomes rare. Ashton's approach is different from most books on creativity. He does not offer techniques for brainstorming or exercises for unlocking your inner artist. Instead, he examines the evidence. He looks at how the Wright brothers actually invented the airplane. He investigates how a young slave named Edmond Albius revolutionized vanilla cultivation. He explores the step-by-step thinking that underlies even the most celebrated "flashes" of insight.…