The unpopular truth about the myth of the lone genius

History keeps lying to you about how breakthroughs happen. Mendeleev didn't dream up the periodic table, Einstein wasn't riding a beam of light, and Darwin wasn't a lone visionary on a boat 

David Epstein argues that the myth of the lone genius is a story we tell, but the actual history of innovation is far more interesting.

In most history books or books about innovation, individual innovations tend to be identified with individual creators or inventors. And I think part of that is because it makes the story tidy, right? It's easy to link. And also often because one individual wins what science historians call a priority dispute. Like they fight to be the person who's remembered in the history books. But it actually is not a good representation of how innovation really happens.

The real story is one of what science historians call multiple discovery. Multiple discovery is a term popularized by Robert Merton, who was kind of the founder of the sociology of science. And what he noticed was that most world-changing breakthroughs are arrived at by multiple people in almost the same way at almost the same time, even though those people are working independently. And he found that this was the norm with world-changing breakthroughs, not the exception.

The light bulb, the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray actually filed with the patent office on the same day for the telephone, the microphone, the camera, the jet engine, the transistor — all of these things, even though they're often identified with one individual when the story is told, multiple people who were not working together were arriving at them at the same time.

And what that tells us about the history of innovation is that we've actually overvalued and over-prioritized the narrative of the lone genius working on their own and breaking through in a way that nobody else ever has. Because if you look at the actual history, there are lots of people converging on a solution. So it tells a completely different story — that there are these boundaries that are being set up and channeling people toward a breakthrough. Not that those geniuses aren't important, but that the context that's pushing them toward a certain problem, defining a certain problem, putting it in frame is more important than any individual mind.

The Periodic Table Was Not Dreamed Up in a Nap

Let's walk through three examples of that. Dimitri Mendeleev was a Siberian genius chemist, and the story that's told about him is that in the winter of 1869, he was trying to find an order to all of the elements, the chemical building blocks of the universe, and that he thought there had to be some order, but he just couldn't find it. There had to be some method to nature's prodigious madness. So he famously spends three days, three sleepless days working to try to order the elements until he can't stay awake any longer. He tips forward, his unruly beard folds into his arms and he falls asleep and drifts off into the most impactful nap in human history. And in that nap, he sees the elements whirling and dancing around him until they snap into columns, and then the columns snap together to form a grid. And as you move across the grid, the properties of elements repeat predictably and periodically, hence the name periodic table. So supposedly Mendeleev wakes up and writes it down as a finished system.

That's the periodic table. That story is beautiful. The Royal Society celebrated it. The mattress company Casper used it in their marketing. Matthew Walker in his blockbuster Why We Sleep touted it as the ultimate proof of our dreaming brain, loose from the bounds of reality. It's a beautiful story. It is also utterly false.

"The problem with that telling is that it obscures the real secret to Mendeleev's success. He wasn't even looking for a fundamental law of nature. He was experimenting with a way to save space in his textbook."

Mendeleev had a publishing contract for a two-volume introduction to chemistry textbook. He had only gotten eight of the then 63 known elements into volume one. So he had to get the other 55 into volume two. And he had to do it in a way that made sense to his customers, which were intro chemistry students. So he was not even looking for a fundamental law of nature. He was experimenting with a way to save space in his textbook. And so he realized he would have to start describing families of elements together in order to fit in the space he had allotted. And it was in doing that as he started sorting elements into families with similarities that he noticed the periodic pattern.

He was a genius. He's the one that's credited in history books, but he wasn't the only one, not even close. In fact, there were zero periodic tables before 1860. And then there were six in the next eight years, all of which had the general idea. Mendeleev's had some advantages, but all of them got the periodic pattern.

Why would that happen? Well, in 1860, there's a meeting in Karlsruhe, a chemistry conference that's called for about a little more than a hundred people because they want to agree on some standards for chemistry. Everyone is doing things differently. People are using chemical notation differently. They're weighing elements differently, all these different things, which means that work can't communicate across space because people aren't working to the same standards. And at that meeting, an Italian named Stanislav Cannizzaro says basically, "Here's how we're all going to measure the weight of elements from now on." And he passes out a pamphlet that says, "Here are the weights. He got something wrong, but that doesn't matter. And here's how we're going to measure them going forward."

And that instantly allowed work in different labs across the world to communicate across space because now people could compare their work to others and understand what others were doing. If you go back and look at the history of innovation, that's often the case — it's setting standards essentially expands the problem-solving team because it allows work to communicate across space. So it's not very sexy, but it is very often a precursor for breakthrough.

Einstein's Real Inspiration Was a Well-Defined Problem

The famous story of Einstein coming up with special relativity involves his thought experiment where he's riding a beam of light. And it's a beautiful story, but Einstein didn't tell it until decades after it supposedly happened. It's really unclear if that truly influenced him at the time or if it was really useful at all.

What we know really influenced Einstein was a much more quotidian, well-defined problem that a bunch of scientists had framed and put into the open for solution. And that was called the magnet and wire problem. Essentially, it involved moving a magnet and a wire past one another to induce an electrical current. And the problem was the science explained it differently depending on which one was moving. And Einstein didn't like that. He said, "Why should the laws of physics be different depending on if the magnet is moving past the wire or the wire is moving past the magnet?" And what he ultimately realized is that the laws of physics didn't have to be different. Our conception of time and space had to change.

And that's the reality of this breakthrough — that other scientists framing a specific problem that he could think about led him to something groundbreaking. It wasn't the freedom of this thought experiment. It was this well-defined problem. And that's very often the case in the history of innovation that someone just defines a problem really well. And that draws a bounding box for people's creative thinking.

Darwin Was a Synthesizer, Not a Solo Creator

We think of Darwin away on this boat on the Beagle, away from other academics, away from other researchers, totally free to think and create. And that's how he makes this breakthrough that changes the world. But in fact, he was totally enmeshed in the thinking of his day. Darwin was not so much a creator as he was a synthesizer. He was really taking work that already existed and combining it in new ways.

There were all these questions that his peers were laying out in a really well-defined way. Things like, "Why are we finding marine fossils on the top of mountains? Why do the bones in the flipper of a whale and the wing of a bat and the arm of a human have so much in common? Why are we finding fossils of animals that don't exist on Earth anymore?" If everything was created in a small amount of time, we shouldn't be seeing those things. In fact, Darwin would correspond with breeders and gardeners. He had about 240 pen pals that he would pepper for information. And he learned that breeders already had a name for spontaneous traits that are passed down from one animal to another. They called them sports.

So Darwin was really taking all this knowledge accumulated in his day and these questions that had come up and synthesizing them into one coherent whole. And that was much more his breakthrough than a single creative leap. It was synthesizing the things that were available and applying them to the questions that other peers around him were posing.

As groundbreaking as Darwin's ideas were, Alfred Russell Wallace came up with basically the exact same things at the exact same time. In fact, when he sent some of his writing to Darwin, Darwin wrote to his mentor and said, "I have never seen a crazier coincidence, basically." And he said, "Everything I've written is going to be out before I publish it because it was so similar."

And there was one commonality between these two men, which is they had both read the same essay by Thomas Malthus — his essay on population, where he argued that humanity would always reach a crisis point because the population would expand faster than the food supply could expand to meet it. Now, Malthus turned out to be right for some of human history but wrong going forward, but it didn't matter that he was wrong. He framed this problem in a way that made both Wallace and Darwin, who read it at about the same time, think about how much species in nature respond to this if they start to outgrow the available food supply. And the answer was, they die out and there's competition for limited resources. And they both, reading that essay — which even though it was wrong about the future of humanity — defined a problem so well that they both said it was almost like a light bulb going on where all their past work was channeled into a specific problem.

The Underrated Art of Setting the Problem

Malthus was what I like to call a problem setter. I think of setter like the person who sets the ball in a volleyball team for the subsequent spike, which would be Darwin and Wallace in this case. And when I was going through the history of creative breakthrough, problem setters don't get a lot of the fame and attention, but they're always there just before a breakthrough — someone who defines a problem really well. Sometimes they are wrong about what they think their own solution is to it, but they're always defining it really well.

"Problem setters don't get a lot of the fame and attention, but they're always there just before a breakthrough — someone who defines a problem really well. Sometimes they are wrong, but they're always defining it really well."

One of the great examples was David Hilbert, who's arguably the most influential mathematician of the 20th century. And around the turn of the 20th century, what he decided to do was basically make a list — go survey all the mathematics of the day, make a list of about two dozen problems that he thought were important, define them really well, like really home in on what should the definition of this problem be. He wrote them out in a pamphlet and he passed them out at a meeting to his colleagues and it set an agenda for math in the 20th century and most of those problems went on to be solved. As brilliant of a mathematician as he was, and he's one of the most brilliant who ever lived, it's widely acknowledged that his biggest influence was collecting a set of problems, defining them really clearly, and it set an agenda for everything that came since.

The title of one of my favorite scientific papers I read while working on this book was called Wrong but Seminal. And it went through a history of scientific papers where someone would come up with something really intriguing, but that was wrong. But because it would lead them to define some certain problem or challenge, it would instantly draw all these other minds to that well-defined problem and that would typically lead to some Nobel-level breakthrough. So these were problem setters who may have been wrong about their own solution, but they defined a problem so well that it empowered other people to start working in a productive way.

Problem Defining Is a Skill Anyone Can Practice

Problem defining is a skill that's open to a huge number of people and incredibly important. And some of that can be as simple as going out and doing research and characterizing a problem. Like this is the best of market research. You go out and you see some problem, you observe people in their work world, you try to figure out some problem that they're all orbiting and then define it for them.

There's one example I loved of this actually. There's an engineer named J. Shree Seth. She worked at the company 3M and she's won the Society of Women Engineers Lifetime Achievement Award — one of the highest awards you can win. And she described her process as mosaic building. What she would do is she would go around to colleagues, to other inventors, kind of interview them about their work, look at their work, try to figure out what problem did she think their work might solve. And then when she would detect a common problem among a bunch of different people who were working apart from each other, she would get them in a room together and then pitch them and say, "Here's the problem that I think you're all orbiting." And she would try to define that problem and say, "That's why we should all work on it."

There's also research in the new book about what's called specific curiosity, which is when you are not just kind of roaming but taking on a certain question that intrigues you and going down a rabbit hole on that. And when you're going down those rabbit holes, just looking for some really specific curiosity that you can well define and even write out and refine and pitch to someone can really prompt other people's creative engines.

There are other leaders, like Tony Fadell, who was the lead designer of the iPod and he then went on to co-found the smart thermostat company Nest. And he's obsessed with constraints. And so one of the things he made the team at Nest do was he made them work inside of a literal box — he made them prototype the packaging before they had a product because he said, "Only things that fit on this package will convey what problem we are solving to the customer who sees it." So get on this box the features that tell the customer what problem of yours are we solving. He mentors entrepreneurs now and his biggest piece of advice is that they should write the press release for what they're doing before they start doing it. And it's really just an exercise that's getting them to force themselves to define the problem they think they'll be solving before they start working.

"We much more think about coming up with ideas as opposed to coming up with problems. There's this one famous saying that people don't want a quarter-inch drill — they want a quarter-inch hole in the wall."

I think problem setting or this problem definition is a really undervalued skill. There's this one famous saying that people don't want a quarter-inch drill — they want a quarter-inch hole in the wall. And what it means is when you're trying to give people a product or service, instead of giving them the thing, you should understand what is the problem they actually need solved and then you can figure out various ways to attack it. And I don't think we spend enough time doing this, right? We much more think about coming up with ideas as opposed to coming up with problems.

Let me give you an example. General Magic had lots of third-party app developers because they were creating the App Store before the App Store. And one of those third-party app developers was named Jeff Hawkins. And Hawkins had created an app for the General Magic operating system called Graffiti. And what Graffiti did was if you took a stylus and made some strokes on a screen it would translate that into letters. When it became clear that General Magic was going to fail, Hawkins took Graffiti and created his own device. It had three functions: calendar, contacts, memo pad. General Magic had all that and a million things more. What Hawkins did was he identified a clear customer problem. This was busy professionals who wanted to sync their calendars and contacts and take them on the go. And he did three of the million things that General Magic did but put them into a coherent device that showed the users why and how it was going to solve their problem. And that was the Palm Pilot. And it became a smash hit in the same era as General Magic.

Demis Hassabis, who was a founder of Google DeepMind and recently won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry even though he's not a chemist, said recently that the most important skill now — which is becoming even more important in the age of AI — is defining a good problem. Finding a good problem and defining it really well because with the tools we have and the brains we have it's making that definition narrow enough that you really channel thinking. And I think that's a skill that's only going to become more important but it doesn't feel like creation. And so we often overlook it.

Innovation Is a Relay Race, Not a Solo Sprint

This importance of making boundaries around the problem being tried to be solved — if you look at the history of innovation, what the science historian James Burke called the jigsaw of invention, you can see one well-defined problem passing to the next in kind of a relay race of invention that leads to things that change the world. In Burke's own work, he had a TV show called Connections. And one of my favorite episodes was where he draws a line from one narrow problem to another that goes from medieval castle battlements all the way to film projectors. Medieval battlements were shaped a certain way in order to get rid of visual blind spots so that you could see who was attacking you. And when they got rid of those visual blind spots that meant that people firing cannons had to move farther away basically. And when they moved farther away, they needed to see farther to where they were going to shoot and eventually it led to film projectors. It wasn't just some giant leap but it was one tightly defined problem after another. And that is kind of the march of innovation. It's not single lone geniuses who just break away from everything in the past. It's much more one problem after another.

The philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn wrote a famous book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in which he talked about paradigm shifts where some creator would come up with something that was so different than what came before they would essentially leave people on either side of this break speaking different languages — like they couldn't even understand one another. And so that did feel like it's this lone genius breaking through in a way that changes everything. And that became very famous — that term paradigm shift sped through politics and business and everything.

But later on Kuhn was working on a book that he didn't finish by the time he died. But a few years ago it was just published. And in that book he takes a very different tack and he talks about the evolutionary nature of discovery. And the subtitle of the book I think speaks for itself: An Evolutionary Theory of Scientific Development. He had nuanced that view of the paradigm shift into one of successive narrow problems that are solved one after another and that lead to breakthrough. Of course that work of his didn't get as famous because it's not as sexy as the whole paradigm shift thing.

"The history of innovation really is one narrowly defined problem after another. I think we should all try to do that — whatever we're working on, what is the most succinct way that I can define the problem that I'm trying to work on."

But the history of innovation really is one narrowly defined problem after another. I think we should all try to do that — whatever we're working on, what is the most succinct way that I can define the problem that I'm trying to work on.