How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention, and Discovery

The main theme of the book is that creativity is not a rare trait reserved only for the select few who are specially endowed. Instead, Ashton asserts, creativity is what makes us human; in other words, we are all creative. The prevailing myth that one either has creativity or doesn’t stops most people from pursuing creative endeavors, and Ashton wants to free people of this self-imposed limitation. He posits this theme right from the beginning, in both the Preface (“The Myth”) and Chapter 1 (“Creating Is Ordinary”), but it is something the author returns to again and again throughout the text.

The second section of Chapter 1 makes the case for this theme in a very straightforward way. Ashton simply estimates how many different people received a patent in the United States from 1790 to 2011, coming up with a figure of roughly six million. Thus, he concludes, “Creating is not extraordinary, even if its results sometimes are. Creation is human” (9). He then presents a mixture of research and anecdotes to prove his point. For example, he cites studies that had the subjects talk out loud as they solved a problem. This showed that the pattern people followed was the same: “begin with something familiar, evaluate it, solve any problems, and repeat until a satisfactory solution is found” (37).