Inspire to Perspire. Perspire to Aspire.

Yesterday, I went to a lecture given by Columbia University business professor William Duggan. I did not have my computer or any paper to take notes on, so what follows is only what I remember of what he said. Because everything is straight from my memory, what follows may not necessarily be in the order he said it in while speaking to us.

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Strategic Intuition by William Duggan

“Genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration.” – Thomas Edison

Duggan doesn’t like the term “genius”; prefers achievement or anything else. In other words, getting anything at all done requires 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration.

Focus is on the 1% inspiration. Perspiration is the result of an idea. Inspiration is what sparks the idea.

Research says that most people become inspired to do something or get an idea while they are in the shower.

Latin meaning of “inspire” means to breathe in. Every idea we have must come from somewhere else in order for “inspiration” to be successful.

Without inspiration, perspiration is a waste of time. Inspiration is the brains of the idea.

Perspiration is the result of an idea. But the idea is the result of inspiration. So without inspiration, there is nothing.

“Who invented the light bulb?” is posed as a trick question. The answer, of course, is Thomas Edison. But it is a trick question. Edison got his idea from an inventor in England (Mr. Swan) and then hired someone else to put it together. Furthermore, Edison has the greatest number of patents in the world till date. This leads historians to believe that Edison personally invented absolutely nothing.

TS Elliot said that “Immature poets imitate. Mature poets steal.” This further indicates that all ideas come from some place else.

There is no reason we cannot apply old strategies to new problems. For instance, there was one time when cars were made on a stationary assembly line. The assembly line itself was invented long before Henry Ford’s time as was the automobile. Oldsmobile had a working automobile in 1901. What Henry Ford did for the automobile industry is create the moving assembly line. But even that was not his idea originally. The idea came from an industry that had nothing to do with the car industry. He got the idea from the “disassembly” line of the slaughterhouse. An animal hung on a line would be killed first, then moved to another person who would take a leg off, and so on down the line. What Ford did was to create the conveyer belt that all manufacturing is based off of today. So the idea of moving something down a line was an old idea but applied to a new problem of moving a car chasis down the line to speed production.

There are four steps which should be followed in problem-solving. The first is “examples from history” throughout your life and put them on the shelves of your brain. The second is “presence of mind” where you free yourself of all preconceptions of what problem you’re solving and what solutions might work. Third comes the “flash of insight” or coup d’oeil, French for “glance”. New combinations of examples from history connect. Fourth is “resolution” where you say both “I see!” and “I’ll do it!”

Apple stole from Xerox and came up with MacOS…Xerox had a graphical user interface and everything needed to run a computer. They even had OOP (object-orientated programming). Xerox set up a huge network, and they had setup email. Xerox had done all this in the 1970s and could have been the Microsoft of today if they had not given away the GUI to Apple. Much of what Xerox was doing at the time was a part of a project for the US Department of Defense.

Google didn’t come up with the idea of putting a map on a webpage. Someone else came up with that idea. Google didn’t come up with the idea of putting text ads along search results. A company named Overture did. Google went against the grain by not setting up a portal so that users would be on and off the page as quickly as possible. Google had to figure out how to make money because the popular belief was that you should make users stay on the page as long as possible by having banner ads and pop-ups. But that would slow the speed of getting search results, which would defeat the purpose of Google’s initial product – the search engine. At one time, the founders of Google nearly gave up and tried to sell their code to Alta-Vista for $1 million, but the company refused to buy. The founders knew that they had something revolutionary from feedback they were getting at Stanford, but weren’t sure what to do with it at the time.

Napoleon’s experiences demonstrate the difference between strategic intuition and expert intuition. When he was 24 years old, he had no expert intuition in fighting wars. But when presented with a problem of the British wanting to take the Fort of Toulon, Napoleon said that that the battle could be fought with swords and bayonets alone. Also, he said that to take the main fort, you need to take the small fort nearby and the British would surrender. But the general didn’t listen to Napoleon and took the main fort anyway. It was a disaster. Another general went in and did what Napolean said, and surely, the British surrendered.

One thing mentioned is that there is no longer any such thing, according to neuroscientists, as a “left side” and “right side” of the brain. It is all one unit as analysis and intuition work together and simultaneously. Every area in the brain is constantly firing. Some fire less than others at times, but it is not connected to any “side” of the brain.

Picasso didn’t start painting in the cubism form until after he met Matisse and saw his paintings. Matisse, on their second meeting at Gertrude Stein’s place, brought an African sculpture and Picasso later incorporated that sculpture into one of his famous paintings. Picasso’s ideas for cubism came only after he was influenced by artwork of Matisse.

Also, strategy was not introduced as a word in the English language until the year 1810, which is quite late. Most words came into the language in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. But when the word “strategy” was introduced, there were also many wars going on during that time period.