

J. Ten

Kintsugi Method

The Optimal Path to a Life Less Ordinary

This is a work of creative nonfiction. Some parts have been fictionalized in varying degrees, for various purposes.

Copyright © 2020 Ginkgo & Biloba

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form – except for brief quotation (not to exceed 1,500 words) – without permission from the publishers.

First edition: January 2020

Cover photograph copyright © 2020 by Harald Klingenberg

# Introduction

A mouse took a stroll  
through the deep dark wood.  
A fox saw the mouse  
and the mouse looked good.

These are the opening lines to The Gruffalo, a cult classic and a masterpiece of children literature, that inspired this book. The Gruffalo is a story of a mouse that goes on a journey through a treacherous wood and outwits a monster by using an unusual strategy. Julia Donaldson's classic sold thirteen million copies but few know that it was inspired by an old tale of how one man cheated death in an amusing way.

In fourth-century BC, China was a country divided, locked in a never-ending war for the overall control of the Chinese empire. The warring states were ruled by kings that were as bad as each other, but one stood out among the rest. The king of the dominant Chu state was vain, ruthless and power hungry.

At the time, the king of Chu was at war with his northern neighbours so he sent a talented general, Zhao, to fight his battles there. Zhao quickly defeated the northern warlords' armies and rumours started to spread around the state of Chu that General Zhao was bolder and more capable than the king himself.

When the king heard the rumours, he rounded up his ministers. "I'm told that all the northern warlords are scared of Zhao," he barked. "Is that so?"

The ministers fell silent. They'd heard the rumours. They knew this was a rhetorical question which would end in their execution for failure to foresee and overcome the general's rise in popularity.

Only one minister, Jiang-yi, dared to step forward.

"Your majesty, if I may." Jiang-yi cleared his throat. "As you know, a tiger is the king of the forest that feasts on many beasts, so one day it caught a fox.

"Facing its imminent death, the fox hissed to the tiger, 'How dare you? The Gods of Heaven sent me to rule over all animals. You will face the wrath of the Gods if you eat me. And if you don't believe me, then let's walk around the forest and you will see for yourself just how mighty I am. Everybody in the forest is afraid of me.'

"The tiger was sceptical but fear of the Gods made him agree. As the odd pair walked through the forest, the animals would see the fox first. Then, their gaze would meet with the fierce tiger casually strolling behind it. Needless to say, all the beasts ran away as quickly as they could.

"Your majesty," Jiang-yi concluded, "you are the tiger of Chu state. Your land is 5,000 square li and your army is 1,000,000 strong. Just like the tiger, you walk behind General Zhao. The northern warlords are not afraid of Zhao. They are terrified of you."

Jiang-yi's speech stroked the king's ego. He contemplated Jiang-yi's words and decided to spare the ministers.

Later recorded in the book Strategies of the Warring States by Liu Xiang, the minister's story of how the fox "borrowed" the tiger's might became a folktale that was told to more Chinese children over the centuries than probably even The Gruffalo. The story's popularity comes from the insight it gives into life. It teaches that, just like Jiang-yi, the fox, or the Gruffalo mouse, a man runs into a challenge sometimes that no amount of hard work can solve. The situation calls for something else entirely. Arguably, all major life challenges can't be solved by hard graft alone.

But what is this extra something?

It's the question I was obsessed with all of my adult life. I once heard somebody say that life is like a song. The song of life should start with a recognisable introduction, followed by strong verses, and it should end with an emotive coda. But what makes the song truly special are the powerful choruses everybody can sing along to. The trouble was, my life had no choruses.

Before I sat down to write this book, I lived a pleasant yet flat and profoundly ordinary life. I dreamed, I strived, I worked hard, I stayed positive, I played along to the rhythm of life and then I waited. I waited for the chorus. I waited for something extraordinary and life-changing to happen to me as a result of all my hard work. As one day melted into another and one year got swallowed by the next, I waited. But the miracle never came. And although my life was hardly a failure, it just wasn't what I'd envisioned.

One day I woke up to face the same old day I'd encountered thousands of times and realised that I'd had enough of waiting. I packed a proverbial rucksack and set out on a quest into the deep dark wood of human experience – history, science, business, religion and psychology – to face the monster question of how to think differently and make extraordinary things happen in life.

I went on this quest for my children, for whom I read The Gruffalo at bedtime more times than I can remember. This book became a personal letter to them. They are too young to understand it now, but I hope someday they will discover their dad's writing and avoid sleepwalking through their life like he did. I hope that it will make them look at life differently, inspire them to achieve their dreams, and give them the strength to walk a path less ordinary.

# 1

Seeing things that others don't

General Wilhelm Thoma, Panzer Afrika Korps, was rudely awoken by a sudden gun blast. Dazed and confused, he threw himself on the ground and crawled around looking for cover.

There was no cover. No stones. No trees. The land was as flat as a pancake. He was in a middle of a desert.

Next came a hail of heavy gunfire so intense that it made the seasoned Nazi general wonder if he would live through the morning.

Where is this gunfire coming from? Who are these guys? he thought as he ran, zig-zagging, for cover. It didn't make sense. These can't be Brits! They are at least a week away. I watched their every move. Spotting a British insignia on a distant tank, all he could think was, That can't be right. No way...

* * *

It was October 1942 and things weren't looking great for the Nazis in Africa. Mussolini's Italian army, the main German ally, was failing so Hitler decided to send his favourite soldier to bail them out.

General Erwin Rommel arrived in February and started to plan big. He was an ambitious man with his sights set firmly on the very top of Nazi hierarchy. He was never staff trained and had to start at the bottom and fight his way through the ranks to become an elite commander. His career breakthrough came when a book he wrote about his army escapades became a national bestseller in Germany. Hitler read the book and became an admirer, which is how Rommel got the African job.

Within a few months of his arrival in Africa, he became world famous by completely dominating the desert, and the British begrudgingly called him the "Desert Fox" for his prodigious ability to outfox them in a tank battle.

Then, on a cold December night, unbeknownst to Rommel, the man who would cause his downfall quietly arrived in Cairo. An unassuming man walked into the British army headquarters and settled himself in his new office – a bathroom.

* * *

Brigadier Dudley Clarke was a man who saw things that other people didn't.

In flight school, he saw a bootlace, a lanyard and some luggage straps and thought, I can use these to turn the lights off without getting out of bed.

In 1941, while on a clandestine assignment posing as a journalist for The Times named "Wrangal Craker" he saw a floral motif dress in a shop window and thought, Hmm, interesting... A few days later, he was arrested wearing the very same dress by the local police while shadowing his target in Madrid.

So when Clarke arrived in Cairo and saw the bathroom, he immediately thought, That would make a splendid office.

For the next few months, Clarke, who didn't have any staff or even an official mandate, walked around Cairo, looked and listened. He was on a lookout for anything that could defeat the Nazis.

In January that year, he had heard that the Italian army was petrified of airborne assaults. So he wrote down a name – 1st Special Air Service – for a parachute brigade that didn't exist. Then he dressed two soldiers in "1 SAS" uniform and made them walk around Cairo, hinting at missions in Crete and Libya.

Later, the commander of the legendary SAS, the unit on which all the world's special forces were modelled, wrote:

The name SAS came mainly from the fact that I was anxious to get the full co-operation of a very ingenious individual ... Dudley Clarke promised to give me all the help he could, if I would use the name of his bogus brigade of parachutists, which was the Special Air Service – the SAS.

David Stirling, 1985

By the time Dudley Clarke crossed paths with General Rommel, he was well on his way to becoming "the greatest British deceiver of WWII". But his greatest feat was yet to come.

* * *

When Clarke arrived in Libya to face the "Desert Fox", he found a shaken British army withdrawing and urgently looking for a way to slow down the enemy advance.

Clarke didn't need much encouragement. He looked, he listened, he asked questions, and then went back to Cairo to work on a deception plan.

This couldn't be a typical deception. Simply using double agents and bogus radio messages that field commanders of his day were using to confuse the enemy weren't enough. He needed to examine the other tools at his disposal. He needed something that had never been done before. And quickly.

Later that week he summoned Geoffrey Barkas, a former documentary film-maker, to have a chat. Barkas left Clarke's office about an hour later, walked out of the headquarters, and scratched his head.

Barkas was a talented camouflage expert who was no stranger to bamboozling the enemy, but Clarke had just asked him to make an entire British army disappear and reappear in a different place. For that kind of task he needed the best people.

First, he called Jasper Maskelyne, a world-class magician. Then he assembled a team of talented artists and architects to start on the task of "providing props for the biggest 'film production' in history".

The plan was simple. The Germans were stationed near a town, El Alamein, which could be approached from the north or the south. The British would attack from the north. But for the attack to be successful, the Germans had to be fooled into believing it was coming from a different direction: the south.

Barkas set to work in the early hours. First, he had to hide the entire British Army arriving in the north. This meant that he had to make 600 tons of supplies, 2,000 tons of petrol and 420 tons of engineering supplies disappear. The incoming supplies would be buried in trenches, hidden under tent netting, shoved into soldiers' quarters, and under vehicles. Every tiny bit of space had to be used.

But the biggest problem was not the supplies. The biggest problem was hiding hundreds of British tanks and armour units. So Clarke and Barkas came up with a novel solution. They decided to dress the tanks and the guns to look like supply trucks. The new tank "outfits" made out of painted canvas and sticks were designed to fool the Germans (who were spying from the sky) into believing that these were just the supply trucks arriving and not the heavy armour.

While he was hiding a huge army in the north, Barkas also had to create an even bigger army in the south. Over several weeks, Barkas and the team conjured up 400 dummy tanks and 1,750 dummy vehicles and guns using palm sticks, canvas, and paint.

But the real stroke of genius was to build a fake water pipe to supply the non-existent south army with water. The Germans would see the pace of pipe's construction and then estimate when the south army would obtain the water to start the attack. Of course, the construction was "running behind schedule" to fool the Germans into believing that the attack would be delayed because the pipe was unfinished.

When the attack finally came from the north, the Germans were shell-shocked.

They believed, without a shadow of a doubt, that the British would attack from the south and were still weeks away from the engagement.

* * *

General Rommel never got to finish the African campaign. He was quietly moved to another assignment to shield his legendary status and reputation from its failure.

Later Rommel was caught up in a plot to kill Hitler and was forced to take a cyanide pill. But not before Winston Churchill announced victory at El Alamein, praising the success of Operation Bertram:

"By a marvellous system of camouflage, complete tactical surprise was achieved in the desert... The Xth Corps, which he had seen from the air exercising fifty miles in the rear, moved silently away in the night, but leaving an exact simulacrum of its tanks where it had been, and proceeded to its points of attack."

Winston Churchill, 1942

Dudley Clarke listened to the speech in his office. Then he turned the radio off and asked his secretary to send in Clifton James, an actor who looked suspiciously like Field Marshal Bernard "Monty" Montgomery.

It was time to make the Normandy invasion disappear.

# 2

The search for lateral thinking

Nobody wants to live an ordinary life. There is no shame in being just a guy, but that's not what this book is about. To live a life less ordinary, you'll have to do an extraordinary thing at least once in your life.

There are two schools of thought on doing extraordinary things. One group holds a firm belief that good things come to those who work hard and think positively. The second group thinks that hard work is for people with no imagination. There is no right or wrong answer, but I subscribe to the latter view, because going hard in the wrong direction or without any special ideas is pointless. There are plenty of smart people who work hard and they are no better off. Fortunately, there is another way, a shortcut if you will, to doing extraordinary things and this is called "lateral thinking".

According to the Cambridge dictionary, lateral thinking is a way of solving a problem by thinking about it in a different and original way, and not using traditional or expected methods. The word "method" in this long-winded definition of lateral thinking intrigued me when I first saw it. It made me wonder – was there a simple method to thinking differently?

There is plenty of scientific theory available on the subject of thinking differently that seems to work great in a lab, but is hopelessly impractical when it came to day-to-day life. Not satisfied with my scientific research on lateral thinking, I turned to real life to find a method for thinking differently and that's how Brigadier Dudley Clarke came into the picture.

Clarke was an innovator, a lateral-thinking prodigy. His deception was the first of its kind, and later copied by armies from all around the world. Clarke's deception was undoubtedly a revolutionary idea at the time. But if you look closer, there was nothing new or revolutionary involved in it. Camouflage had been used by armies for centuries. Likewise fake manoeuvres involving soldiers, guns and tanks. There were no new ingredients in what he had done. The deception came from Clarke simply taking old ingredients and then putting them together in a new way. But Clarke wasn't the only lateral thinker who came up with new and extraordinary things by using old ingredients.

When the iPhone first came out, it looked like an incredible technological breakthrough. Everybody marvelled at its groundbreaking touchscreen technology. But most people who bought the iPhone at the time weren't aware that touchscreen technology had been around for a long time previously. Years before the iPhone went on sale, Steve Jobs was playing with a Newton MessagePad, a touchscreen digital assistant, in his office. Legend has it that it was this device that led to the creation of the iPhone. The Apple engineers merely married the MessagePad with phone functionality. The new device, based on old technology, was launched in 2007 and transformed the way we live and communicate.

But that wasn't even the first touchscreen smart phone. Before Apple told the world that they were developing the iPhone, LG Electronics announced that they were working on LG Prada. In May 2007, LG Prada made history by officially becoming the first mobile phone with touchscreen technology on sale. When iPhone came out a couple of months later, the bitter head of LG Mobile Handset Research and Development, Woo-Young Kwak, announced this to the press about Apple's creation:

"We consider that Apple copycat Prada phone after the design was unveiled when it was presented in the iF Design Award and won the prize in September 2006."

Although both phones looked remarkably similar, it's unclear whether Kwak's accusations were true or not. Either way, Steve Jobs was revolutionising the phone by connecting old ideas. But it wasn't just Jobs who used old ideas to create new technology. The entire history of the telephone is based upon people doing exactly that.

To this day, there is an ongoing dispute about who invented the telephone. Officially, it was Alexander Graham Bell. But in late 1800s, Bell was sued by Antonio Meucci for borrowing his ideas. The trial lasted more than nine years with Meucci nearly winning it at one point, only for the decision to be reversed by the Supreme Court when the US prosecuting attorney died and Bell's telephone patents expired.

Some speculate that Bell stole the idea, or parts of it, from Elisha Gray, who incidentally filed a telephone prototype patent on the very same day as his application. During the legal dispute between Gray and Bell, the patent office clerk Zenas Wilber testified:

"Professor Bell was with me an hour when I showed him the drawing [of Gray's patent] and explained Gray's methods to him."

Wilber also said that not only had he showed Gray's invention to Bell, but he had also told his superiors that Bell's patent was filed first, all for a hundred bucks.

It's unclear if Wilber's accusations are true. As an alcoholic in considerable debt, he wasn't a reliable witness. Whether his testimony is true or not, the fact remains that the telephone's history is less about creativity and more about people borrowing old ideas.

And it's not just technology either.

Einstein's theory of relativity is perhaps one of the most famous original ideas out there. Yet somehow there is a long-standing dispute about who conceived the theory and who should take credit for its discovery. Not only is there a long list of contenders that bizarrely includes Einstein's first wife, but there is even a question mark around whether or not Einstein came up with his general relativity equations independently. David Hilbert, a German mathematician who exchanged correspondence with Einstein about the general relativity equations, would publicly say that the relativity theory was Einstein's idea, but that didn't stop him from writing in 1916,

"Einstein [...] in his most recent publications, returns directly to the equations of my theory."

Are there any truly original ideas out there? Yes, but they are accidental discoveries. For instance, penicillin was discovered by Alexander Fleming when he left a Petri dish open and it was contaminated by mould.

Accidental discoveries aside, most innovative thinking comes from old ideas. It's as if the innovators know instinctively where to look to find old ideas ripe for repurposing. This nuance was best summed up by Steve Jobs himself:

"Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people first how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things."

In 1996, Steve also said,

"Picasso had a saying – 'good artists copy; great artists steal' – and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas."

According to Steve Jobs and Picasso, two of the most inventive people ever, lateral thinking is simply connecting old ideas. This means that if you ever wanted to invent or re-invent anything, say your life for instance, all you need to do is connect old ideas in a new way.

However, there is one complication with this view. To connect ideas you need to find them first. You have to search the vast well of the world's knowledge to find great previous ideas to synthesise something new and exciting. It's this search that is the key to doing extraordinary things.

So, let's talk about the method.

# 3

The method

If you opened a newspaper at the end of July in 1939, you would've found a colourful report about one woman's search for lost treasure. It was a peculiar story about ghosts, prophetic visions, spiritualist seances and the biggest treasure ever found in Europe.

The protagonist of the story was Edith Pretty, a grieving widow who turned to spiritualism when her husband and the love of her life died of a sudden illness. Legend has it that after her husband's death, Pretty heard stories of ghosts wandering around the mysterious mounds at the back of her Sutton Hoo estate. She consulted a known spiritualist and, during a séance, an apparition appeared of a man on a black horse who told her to plunge a sword into the mounds. It's unclear whether it was Pretty's seances or simply her curiosity that led her to become interested in the mounds, but eventually she had them excavated.

What she found hidden inside were the remains of an Anglo-Saxon funerary ship and a huge cache of seventh-century royal treasure. The artefacts, along with gold and gems found at the burial site at Pretty's Sutton Hoo estate, rivalled Tutankhamun's tomb in terms of historical significance, which prompted the British Museum to declare it "one of the most important archaeological discoveries of all time".

Pretty, who graciously donated the treasure to the British Museum, received a letter from Winston Churchill's office some time later, offering her a covetable honour, Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE), in recognition of her gift to the nation. But Pretty, being the woman she was, politely declined – a decision for which her sister Elizabeth called her "a goose!"

The search and discovery of the Sutton Hoo treasure was a remarkable story about a remarkable woman. But if you read the articles about the discovery a little closer in 1939, you would've found an even more amazing story of the unsung hero whom Pretty hired to do the excavation.

Unlike Pretty, who was fabulously wealthy by way of inheritance, Basil Brown was a man of poor financial standing, which caused difficulties throughout his life and meant that the only transport he ever owned was a humble bicycle. But this didn't stop Basil, a son of a farmer and wheelwright, to take an interest in the highbrow science of archaeology. Despite his limited formal education, Brown taught himself Latin, French, German and Spanish by listening to foreign language broadcasts. He also earned a certificate in drawing by attending evening classes, and obtained diplomas with distinctions for astronomy, geography and geology through studies with the correspondence college.

When Pretty approached Brown about the mysterious mounds on her estate, he was doggedly pursuing his passion for archaeology despite struggling financially for years and supplementing his farm income by working as a local police constable and insurance agent. So when Pretty offered him a chance to fulfil his dream, he seized it with unrelenting enthusiasm. First, he asked to be lodged with Pretty's chauffeur. Then he talked two estate workers into helping him with his dig. Later, Brown also recruited the son of the under-gardener to help him excavate in the evenings.

Despite all Brown's efforts, the first year of the dig was a bitter disappointment – a few shards of pottery, fragments of an iron axe, and a handful of rivets from a ship. Nevertheless, Brown wasn't about to give up on his dream of a major archaeological discovery. Brown doubled his efforts instead. In the spring of 1939, he came back to the site with a gardener and a gamekeeper to continue his search.

Eventually, Brown's persistence paid off. His patient work uncovered the impression of a ship in the acidic soil that would turn out to be twenty-seven metres long. And the rest was archaeological history.

In July 1939, when the news of the discovery first came out, behind the sensational headlines of Sutton Hoo's story of ghosts, seances and hidden riches was a low-key but much more inspiring story of a quiet man searching for and finding a different kind of treasure – a way to fulfil a lifelong dream. The real headline should've been:

Struggling, self-taught amateur archaeologist makes one of the most important historical discoveries of all time and achieves his lifelong ambition.

***

We all have dreams we'd like to come true. Sadly, most of us are nothing like the persistent Basil Brown, so our dreams stay just that: dreams. But let's be logical about this. Who wants to suffer like Brown did for decades before finally having a chance to fulfil our vision?

Arguably, a more efficient way to realise a dream is to reduce it to a simple logical problem to be solved. Viewing a dream as just another problem to be solved has its benefits. Unlike dreams, problems have practical solutions. All you need to do is search for them.

The trouble is, the bigger the dream, the bigger the problem. Or at least that's the popular belief. There is a belief circulating out there that a big problem requires a complicated solution. Not necessarily. Computer scientist and physicist, Stephen Wolfram, a pioneer of complex system research, firmly believes that the vast complexity of the universe is likely generated by one simple rule. When he was asked how long this rule is, he replied, "I'm guessing it's really very short. Perhaps three, four lines of code."

Wolfram is probably right. More often than not, the answer to tricky problems is paradoxically simple. The search for a solution to your life problem, or the solution itself, doesn't have to be complicated. And this brings me to the method. The method in this book is designed to inspire you to cut through life's noise and come up with effective solutions to complex life problems in the simplest way possible.

Although the method can be used on any problem, it's not just about problem solving. It's a way to design an escape plan from a life that you are not happy with. It's the first domino that will trigger a chain of events that will get you what you want.

The method has four parts. Let's look at each one in turn.

1. Goal

To begin solving a personal problem, you first need to define what you are working on – your goal. As an example, let's say meeting someone special was your goal. It helps to define the goal in as simple terms as possible, like this:

2. Search criterion

Once the goal is clearly defined, you are ready to begin your search. First, you need to ensure that you search in the right direction. To do that, you need to define the criteria you will be searching by. You can do this by asking a question:

I want to (insert a goal: find a boyfriend) and it's important to me that (list things that are important to you: who, what, where, why, when, how).

You can list as many as you want. The end result should look something like this:

Now that you have different criteria to search by, you need to reduce them to just the one. In order to do this, you can give rating to each criterion, say on a scale of 1 to 10, based on their importance to you. Then, leave just the highest-rated criterion and get rid of all the rest.

Let's say "He's successful" was your highest-rated criterion.

3. Find options

The next step is to come up with different options based on the main search criterion: "He's successful". All you need to do next is search and come up with some options for where successful guys hang out. It doesn't take long to come up with these options:

4. Choose one option

Now rate the options based on the scale of 1 to 10 according to their appeal to you, then leave the highest-rated option and get rid of the rest, like this:

That's it. You mapped out your path to a solution.

In summary, the algorithm for the method looks like this:

At this point, you are probably thinking that this is too simple and obvious. But it's not as obvious as it looks.

# 4

Yin, Yang and the Game of Life

The method came from my research into creative problem solving, based on science and some innovative ideas. One of these ideas was the following proven step-by-step problem-solving algorithm by Richard Feynman, a Nobel prize-winning physicist and the man whom many scientists admire as much as Einstein.

1. Write down the problem.

2. Think very hard.

3. Write down the answer.

Jokes aside, problem solving was too dull a subject to maintain my interest for long. At the time, I was far more interested in just about everything else. But one day I came across something completely unrelated to problem solving that reminded me of my earlier foray into the subject, and challenged me to improve on Feynman's algorithm. This something was the Eastern philosophy of Taoism.

* * *

Taoism's origins can be traced back to a scroll written in 10th century BC by a mythical Chinese emperor, Fu Xi. The legend has it that Fu Xi wanted to master the world so he came up with a strange code (trigrams) in order to do so. Fu Xi's trigrams later turned into sixty-four hexagrams to form the most influential Chinese book ever, the I Ching.

In ancient China, the I Ching was used as a divination tool that explained how everything in the universe worked. The main premise of the book was an idea that everything was controlled by two opposing states, Yin and Yang, and the sixty-four hexagram code explained how.

In the 16th century, Joachim Bouvet, a French Jesuit, brought one of the first copies of the I Ching to Europe. It so happened that Joachim was friendly with a certain Gottfried Leibniz, the German scientist who invented calculus.

At the time, Leibniz was trying to create characteristica universalis, a universal language that would not only explain everything in the universe but could also be used to compute everything in it. When Leibniz saw the I Ching, he became obsessed with the book and particularly with the sixty-four hexagrams. As a mathematician, he instantly recognised a pattern in the hexagrams. He noticed that the hexagrams had been created using just two symbols, a solid line called Yang and a broken line called Yin. Leibniz converted the two lines to numerical values. He assigned 1 to the Yang line and 0 to the Yin line. The end result was the invention of the binary code.

Over the following centuries, Leibniz's invention was largely forgotten. Then, early pioneers of computing discovered Leibniz's binary code when they were building a device capable of doing complex calculations. They used 1s and 0s to reflect two "on" and "off" states of an electrical transistor, and the first modern computer was born.

Today, Leibniz's binary code lies at the core of all computers. 1s and 0s power all computation inside the machine. By a twist of fate, Leibniz's vision of the universal language was fulfilled, except his language powered a mini universe inside a computer with its own inhabitant – artificial intelligence.

But this wasn't the end of the binary code's story.

In 1968, John Conway, a Cambridge University mathematician, thought of an interesting experiment. He used a computer-modelling technique called cellular automation to try to answer some tough questions around mathematical logic.

Cell automation modelling was similar to the type of computer spreadsheet many of us use at work every day. It comprised a grid of square cells, similar to a spreadsheet, except Conway programmed each cell to have 1 (alive) state and 0 (dead) state. If a cell was "alive", it would turn black in colour. If a cell was "dead", then it would go blank or contain no colour. He also set a couple of basic rules around how the cells should behave and then started the simulation, which looked like a simple computer game. This game later became known as the Game of Life.

When John started his simulation, a remarkable thing happened. The cells in the "spreadsheet" began emerging, self-replicating, evolving into various species, and self-organising spookily similarly to our own complex biological life. And it was all happening without any interference from Conway.

The real-life complexity of artificial life that Conway's simple game generated caused some of the brightest minds of the 20th century to speculate that our world was built from cellular automation.

The 3,000-year-old Taoist Yin-Yang code, as interpreted by Leibniz, was behind John Conway's artificial life. It seems an odd choice for an ancient Chinese emperor to represent the world as lines of code to begin with, but it's even odder that the code powers computation that mimics real life. Some people even believe that there is a good chance that one day it will power an exact copy of our life using a quantum computer. Richard Feynman was one of those people. In 1982, he wrote, "I therefore believe it's true that with a suitable class of quantum machines you could imitate any quantum system, including the physical world."

The story of Taoist Yin-Yang code was undoubtedly intriguing but it held little practical value to me, mainly because the code for minimum and maximum states on its own was useless. The minimum and maximum states need a rule to make them work. Take Conway's Game of Life, for instance. If he only had 0s, then the game wouldn't exist. All cells would be dead and there would be no life. Similarly, if he only had 1s, life would have no room to exist also. The same applies to a computer. If you only had 0s, or you only had 1s, no computing would take place. It's the rule on how the two states should interact that makes the machine come alive. And this is the rule I was after.

Conway fiddled with the rules until he settled on the one that gave him a good balance between the two states. He found the right balance between Yin and Yang, 1s and 0s, and life flourished. So I wondered if real life followed a similar rule. Perhaps this rule could provide some answers to solving problems in life.

I turned to Taoism again. It spoke at length about a dynamic balance between Yin and Yang, so maybe it had something about the rule for how the real game of life should be played.

# 5

The principle of least action

The central concept in Taoism is wu wei. The literal translation of wu wei is "without action" and the advice is to take the path of least action in life. According to Taoism, it's nature's way and the main rule to live by.

Wu wei was an intriguing concept and it didn't take long to find an identical concept in modern science, except it wasn't called wu wei, it was called the "principle of least action". The principle came from physics and was focused on achieving a goal with the least amount of effort and time.

The principle of least action is a little-known scientific principle which you probably never heard of unless you are a physicist. It's certainly not as well-known as, say, gravity. We've all heard about Newton's famous apple that fell to the ground because of gravity. But the fact that it fell in a straight line rather than a weird curve because of the principle of least action is less common knowledge. According to the principle of least action, the apple fell in a straight line because it was minimising its effort and time falling. It took the easiest and quickest path to the ground.

But this alternative explanation of how gravity works using the principle of least action was just the tip of the iceberg.

In the 1600s, Pierre de Fermat confirmed that light travelled in a straight line between two points along the path of shortest time, thus minimising its effort.

Remember David Hilbert, the German mathematician who wrote that Einstein used his equations for the relativity theory? Well, he used the principle of least action to come up with them. It's called Einstein–Hilbert action. But what was more intriguing was doing the Einstein's relativity equations using the principle of least action allowed for easy unification of general relativity with other theories in physics, like Maxwell theory in electromagnetism.

And the connections didn't stop there. The principle was the only thread that connected many conflicting theories in physics. It connected gravity to relativity, to electromagnetism, and eventually to quantum mechanics. The quantum physicist, Richard Feynman, would explain to his PhD students that a particle always travelled the shortest path, therefore minimising its effort, just like light. According to quantum physics, the particle is the smallest thing that everything consists of, including you.

The principle of least action was also what connected physical chemistry to statistical mechanics to quantum electrodynamics to string theory to thermodynamics to hydrodynamics to astronomy to material science. And the list went on. The principle appeared everywhere but usually as a humble footnote at the bottom of the page. And its anonymity continued once you left the world of physics and mathematics.

There was little research into the principle of least action in other fields of science. One obscure research paper proved that the evolutionary principle of natural selection and the principle of least action is one and the same. Some research explained how information flows in the human brain and artificial intelligence neural networks using the principle of least action. Also, there were a couple of little-known examples in biology. For instance, ants always try to run the shortest routes to save energy and time. So do rats. If you block a rat's shortest path to food, it takes the next shortest path. If you block the new shortest path, it will try to find another shortest path, and so on.

But what about the human animal?

In the human domain, the principle of least action has another name – the principle of least effort – and is relegated to the field of linguistics. This new alias came from Harvard linguist, George Kingsley Zipf, who observed that both a speaker and a listener were trying to minimise their time and effort communicating. Zipf's theory explained why the word "mathematics" became "math" (or "maths", the British equivalent), the word "airplane" (or "aeroplane") became "plane", and "God be with you" became "goodbye", and then "bye". But Zipf's theory also explained the frequency with which people use words. According to his research, people use some words more frequently than others to save time and effort, so there are a few common words, a middling number of medium frequency words, and many low frequency words. This distribution of words follows a strict mathematical formula called Zipf's law, which some scientists describe as "puzzling" and "enigmatic". The "enigmatic" label came from an observation that Zipf's law and its formula applies not only to English but also to other languages as well. In fact, it applies to all known languages, including some ancient ones that we can't translate, like Meroitic. Nobody knows exactly why the words arrange themselves in such a precise way despite the vast differences between languages, except for Zipf, it seems, who wrote this about his theory:

"[The principle of least effort] is [..] the primary principle that governs the entire individual and collective behaviour of all sorts, including the behaviour of our language and preconceptions."

Zipf might not be wrong.

We start a typical day by taking the quickest and easiest route to work in the morning. We hop on a bus, a train, or a car, all invented to save time and effort. We use a computer and a phone at work, which are easier and quicker ways to communicate than smoke signals. After work, we go to a grocery shop where we pay for things with a credit card, which is an easier and quicker way to pay than carrying cash, shells, beads or bags of gold. Then, we make dinner using a stove, which is an easier and quicker way to cook than starting a fire. After dinner, we switch on a TV, which is an easier and quicker way to be entertained than dancing, singing and banging drums by a camp fire. And at night, we go to bed hoping to fall asleep as quickly and easily as possible.

Like light, particles, rats and ants, we too are obsessed with achieving goals with as little energy and time as possible. Why is that? Why is the principle of least action so universal? And why is the universe so hellbent on efficiency that it makes even the tiniest particle save time and effort?

Unfortunately, there was no unified scientific theory explaining why. The best I could find was this quote from French mathematician, Pierre Louis Maupertuis, who was credited with formulating the principle of least action and whose biology work was a significant precursor to genetics and Darwin's evolutionary theory.

"This is the principle of least action, a principle so wise and so worthy of the Supreme Being, and intrinsic to all natural phenomena; one observes it at work not only in every change, but also in every constancy that Nature exhibits [...]

"The laws of motion and equilibrium derived from this principle are exactly those observed in Nature. We may admire the applications of this principle in all phenomena: the movement of animals, the growth of plants, the revolutions of the planets, all are consequences of this principle. The spectacle of the universe seems all the more grand and beautiful and worthy of its Author, when one considers that it is all derived from a small number of laws laid down most wisely."

Maupertuis seemed to imply that everything in the universe, whether a particle or a human, takes an action. And then, everything tries to minimise time and effort doing the action. It's the rule that everything in the universe follows.

But Maupertuis's comments were not a formal theory, so I had to conclude that the principle of least action was just how things worked from time to time.

Taoism was onto something. The wu wei principle of least action was as close to a fundamental rule of life as you could get. And if it was the rule, I had to take advantage of it. I wanted to find a practical way to apply the principle to generate creativity and success in life. And so I enthusiastically set to work, but immediately ran into a big problem.

# 6

Taking the optimal path

When I first mentioned the principle of least action to people, they instantly associated it with laziness and nothing could change this perception.

My girlfriend was the first to be sceptical. "What if I was choosing between a holiday in England and going to the sunny Bahamas?" she asked me. "Must I stay in rainy, cold England, according to the principle of least action? It would save me time and energy travelling."

One day, I was washing dishes with a friend. My friend accidentally sprayed me with water and then said, "Oh look, you are washing the dishes and taking the morning shower at the same time. I just saved you a bunch of time and effort showering. It's the principle of least action at work!"

I even discovered a science book about the principle that called the universe lazy by design: the word "lazy" was in the book's title.

It was apparent that the "least action" wording was easy to misinterpret. So I decided that I need a simple and unscientific example to illustrate the principle.

Imagine there are three stones in front of you.

1. Small – a tiny pebble the size of your thumbnail

2. Medium – a stone the size of your fist

3. Large – a boulder the size of a toaster

Now, let's say you had to pick the easiest stone to lift. The easiest and quickest to lift would be the pebble because it's the lightest of the three stones.

But let's say you had a different problem. What if you had to pick a stone to hammer a nail into a plank of wood? In this case, the easiest and quickest way would be to use the medium stone. The medium stone would be easy to grasp and it's just the right weight. It would be harder to hammer the nail using the pebble or the boulder.

Now, let's say you had to stop a truck from rolling down a hill. The easiest and quickest way to solve this problem would be to use the big boulder. You could put it under the truck's tyre to stop it from rolling down the hill.

But what if you had to put the maximum weight on the measuring scales? The easiest and quickest way to do this would be to take all three stones and put them on the scales together. Using all three stones would give you the maximum weight there is available.

As you can see, all four problems were different. Some required almost no effort; some would make you sweat. But your mind wasn't making any lazy choices. It was simply using the principle of least action to pick the solution that required just the right amount of effort and time to solve the problem. Not more. Not less. The principle helped you pick the optimal path to solving your problem.

The principle of least action is not about laziness. It's about finding an optimal path in any given situation. Frankly, it'd be better off being called the principle of the optimal path.

The wisdom of the principle lies in the fact that all things in nature follow an optimal path. And like all things in nature, we also have an optimal path that we need to follow. Arguably, that's what the wise men of Taoism were talking about. After all, the word Tao means "path". Their advice was to follow the optimal path given to you by the universe. And if you don't, you'll end up taking wrong turns on your way to achieving your goals and will become dissatisfied and unfulfilled. Not taking your optimal path in life is akin to using a pebble to hammer a nail into a piece of wood. You could huff and puff tapping the nail fruitlessly with your tiny pebble, but it would be a waste of time and effort. There is a better path for you.

Yet finding your optimal path in life is not that simple. For instance, you know the optimal path almost straightaway in the stones example. You look at the stones and your mind applies the principle of least action within milliseconds, guiding you to choose the easiest and quickest stone for the job. But you have a million stones to choose from in life. They all look similar or completely different, and require less effort or more. Which one is the quickest and easiest to use to achieve your goal? Which one will give you the optimal path?

To find your optimal path, or indeed a path to solve any problem, you need to search. Ideally, you need to perform a search query by trying a large sample, say 10,000 out of the million stones, and then picking the best one. This is how nature does it. Nature searches by trying numerous random paths and then picking the optimal one. For instance, here is a short excerpt from Richard Feynman's lecture on how a particle searches and finds an optimal path.

"In the case of light we also discussed the question: How does the particle find the right path? From the differential point of view, it is easy to understand. Every moment it gets an acceleration and knows only what to do at that instant. But all your instincts on cause and effect go haywire when you say that the particle decides to take the path that is going to give the minimum action. Does it 'smell' the neighboring paths to find out whether or not they have more action? In the case of light, when we put blocks in the way so that the photons could not test all the paths, we found that they couldn't figure out which way to go, and we had the phenomenon of diffraction.

"Is the same thing true in mechanics? Is it true that the particle doesn't just 'take the right path' but that it looks at all the other possible trajectories? And if by having things in the way, we don't let it look, that we will get an analog of diffraction? The miracle of it all is, of course, that it does just that. That's what the laws of quantum mechanics say. So our principle of least action is incompletely stated. It isn't that a particle takes the path of least action but that it smells all the paths in the neighborhood and chooses the one that has the least action by a method analogous to the one by which light chose the shortest time."

What Feynman is saying is that both the particle and the light run a search. They check all the available paths by running them first and then they select an optimal path based on the results of their search.

Argentine ants use the same search-and-optimise algorithm. In the 1990s, Jean-Louis Deneubourg, a scientist from Université libre de Bruxelles, conducted an experiment which involved a small bridge for ants to cross in order to secure food and bring it back to their nest. But it wasn't a simple bridge. It was split into different routes of varying lengths.

The Argentine ants would initially start running across the bridge using all the routes. As they ran, they would leave trails of pheromones behind them. Of course, the ants who used the shortest route would find the food and return to the nest sooner. These ants had a chance to run to the food source and back leaving the shorter route covered in double the amount of pheromones. The ants who took the longer routes were still trying to get back to the nest so their routes weren't covered in as much of the substance. Once the shorter, more pheromone-rich route was established, the rest of the ants would quickly sense it and start using it instead of the longer options.

But you are not an ant colony. You can't possibly try thousands of available paths in life just so you can select the best one. It would require an infinite amount of time and effort. You need to optimise your search. And this is where the method comes in. It's there to help you narrow down your search for your optimal path based on the principle of least action. It's a problem-solving tool to help you zero in on the path that really matters.

So, let's begin with the one thing that really matters.

# 7

The one thing that really matters

The transformation of Alcoa Corporation from ailing giant to one of the best-performing companies in the world is the stuff of legend.

There is probably a bunch of postgrads at Harvard Business School right now who've been assigned to write 10,000 words on Alcoa by Monday. Truth be told, most of these aspiring CEOs will never reach the heights of Paul O'Neill, the quiet leader of Alcoa Corp.

O'Neill's tenure as CEO was every Wall Street analyst's dream. By the time he retired, O'Neill had taken Alcoa's stock from $5 to $40. The company's value had risen by $26 billion. Its revenue nearly doubled from $9.8 billion to $16.3 billion. And the 59,000-strong workforce swelled to 140,000 employees in 36 countries.

But this remarkable performance was not the reason why people study O'Neills's work. Alcoa's transformation was one of the most peculiar turnarounds in business history.

* * *

It all began in 1987 when a middle-aged man who looked like a high-school calculus teacher walked out on stage and sat down at a long table facing anxious Alcoa shareholders, investors and press.

Paul O'Neill was not a swashbuckling leader who could command the room with his unshakable charisma. So when he sat at the table, the faces in the room frowned sceptically.

O'Neill adjusted his wrinkled suit. Moved the mic a bit closer. Opened his mouth, and made things even worse.

"I want to talk to you about worker safety," he opened. "Every year, numerous Alcoa workers are injured so badly that they miss a day of work. Our safety record is better than the general American workforce, especially considering that our employees work with metals that are 1,500 degrees and machines that can rip a man's arm off. But it's not good enough. I intend to make Alcoa the safest company in America. I intend to go for zero injuries."

People in the room looked at each other, perplexed.

In 1987, Alcoa Corp, the largest aluminium producer in the world, was going down in flames. The cutthroat competition in the aluminium market was washing away the company's profits, the costs were bigger than the Beatles, and any chance of salvation looked beyond hope for the company.

The investors and shareholders needed action. They needed a man with a business vision, ideally centred around selling lots and lots of aluminium. So when O'Neill talked passionately about some health and safety stuff, it was akin to Emperor Nero fiddling while the city of Rome burned.

What a hippie, thought one journalist. He raised his hand and asked a more pressing question about company's profits.

"I'm not certain you heard me." O'Neill cut the guy short. "If you want to understand how Alcoa is doing, you need to look at our workplace safety figures."

Man... the journalist thought to himself. What's with this guy and safety?

* * *

Frances Perkins couldn't hold back her tears.

She shielded her face from the blazing heat as she watched Triangle Shirtwaist Factory burn with hundreds of workers, mostly young women, trapped inside.

Just a few weeks ago, the girls of Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fought with management and won a fifty-four-hour work week and other benefits. The only thing they didn't ask for was to install the fire escapes. So when the fire started, they tried to jump out the factory windows, only to be enveloped by flames.

Frances never forgot that day. She quit, randomly picketing for women's equality rights on the streets, and dedicated herself to a steadfast career in the New York City government. Within a few years, she was handpicked by Franklin D. Roosevelt to become the US Secretary of Labour and the first woman to ever hold a cabinet position in the US government. It wasn't a publicity stunt. She was picked on merit.

Her appointment couldn't have come at a worse time. It was 1933 and Great Depression was weeding out the strong from the weak. Millions of people lost their jobs for good reason, bad reason, or no reason at all. And the only ones who stood between the workers and the industry fat cats were the trade unions.

The plight of the unions was led by a headstrong Sidney Hillman, a Lithuanian Jew who represented the textile industry's interests. In 1933, he approached Frances Perkins with bad news.

Sidney met with Frances and told her that the unrest among the workers in the US was getting out of control because they were fed up with unfair treatment by the large corporations. The scandalous wages, the long hours, poor safety, and child labour were just some of issues the unions were fuming about.

So Frances worked together with Sidney on an ambitious plan to restore the balance between the companies and the people.

* * *

Angry trade unions was something with which Paul O'Neill of Alcoa was intimately familiar. Before he was appointed as a CEO, he was briefed that Alcoa's trade unions were holding the company hostage.

Alcoa was an old company. So old, in fact, that the world's first plane built by the Wright Brothers was powered by an engine block and crankcase that were made from Alcoa's aluminium.

But when O'Neill joined the company in 1987, the aluminium market matured and was full of players who undercut the prices by flooding the market with material that was much cheaper and just as good as Alcoa's product. As the aluminium market became saturated, the profits declined. The workers' pay and benefits decreased and the relations with the unions soured. In a short space of time, Alcoa's plants degenerated into hotbeds of grievances and absenteeism.

Problems like poorly trained supervisors, management turnover and a lack of communications became the norm. Workers' grievances raised over trivial matters mounted. And the young, scared supervisors were not at all prepared to deal with the confrontation.

It was normal for plant supervisors to fake production figures and ignore workers clocking in and out. When the senior management came to check, they would put on a cheerful performance to hide the problems facing the factories.

The whole Alcoa operation descended into farce.

At one factory, the plant manager became so accustomed to workers' strikes that one day he went home and brought back parasols to shield picketing workers from the scorching sun. Some plant managers brought the strikers coffee and doughnuts to stop them from starving while waiting for their demands to be met. And this sympathy went both ways.

At one factory, the employees took a "time out" from the strike to fix an electric generator to stop aluminium smelting equipment from being destroyed by frost. This saved the factory from being ruined by sub-zero temperatures. On both sides, people were fed up with the Cold War between the unions and the company.

In short, Alcoa's operation was spiralling out of control in 1987. There was a glaring power imbalance between the corporation and its workers. The company desperately needed order, common sense and discipline.

* * *

Frances Perkins heard similar stories of discontent from the union leader, Sidney Hillman. She was the only person to listen to the trade unions complain about terrible conditions at the leading US manufacturers. So in 1935 she made history.

Not only did she give the unions a seat at the government table by introducing them to Roosevelt, but she also created policies that shaped North America and the world for years to come. In the space of a few years, she pushed for government approval on restrictions on child labour, the first minimum wage law in the US, unemployment insurance, adoption of social security benefits, introduction of the forty-hour work week, and overtime pay rules. This brave new legislation cemented her legacy as one of the most influential, unspoken heroes of the 20th century.

The policies she introduced sent a seismic wave of change throughout corporate America, lifting unspoken numbers of workers out of poverty and giving them a safety net when times were tough.

She single-handedly restored the invisible balance between the workers and the self-serving corporations, somehow keeping both parties happy.

* * *

When Paul O'Neill spoke about the workers' safety at his maiden shareholders' meeting, only a select few knew what he was up to. The rest were clueless.

One befuddled anonymous investor told the New York Times: ''Every speech made began with a discussion of safety. He'd go visit investors and talk about safety. They could care less and he's off for twenty minutes on it."

O'Neill's focus on safety was so intense that he would often begin his speeches by pointing out where the fire exits were.

Only a handful of observers noted that O'Neill spent the best part of his career in government, working for the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), a governing body responsible for many things, the least of them being accountable for national economic policy.

O'Neill was a pioneer. He was one of the first executives to deliberately apply a well-defined, government-like policy to improve financial performance of a publicly owned business. The genius of his approach was that no one wanted to argue with him about safety policy. The unions had been fighting for years to improve safety, and the management didn't object either because accidents resulted in low morale.

The domino effect of Paul's safety policy transformed the company.

To understand how the accidents happened, the manufacturing process had to be reviewed and changed. To educate employees about safety, specialists had to be brought in to teach them how to operate machinery better, so product quality improved.

Also, new communication methods were introduced to report accidents quickly. Alcoa became one of the first companies to adopt email in the early 1980s. It was initially used to discuss safety issues but then a manager in Brazil had a bright idea to send steel price changes to a colleague in New York, who made a killing on Wall Street using the data.

The newly found order and discipline streamlined the entire company. Costs fell. Quality improved. Accidents virtually disappeared. But more importantly, there was a fundamental shift in morale and attitude.

* * *

Paul O'Neill retired from Alcoa in 2000.

But the man, who once turned down a membership at an exclusive Pittsburgh golf club because it banned women and blacks, was by no means done.

In 2007, he published a report in the New York Times criticising government handling of the healthcare system. In the report, he called for doctors and hospitals to report medical errors within twenty-four hours.

It was exactly the kind of policy of which Frances Perkins would have approved.

# 8

If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change

To achieve your goals quickly and with the least effort you need to narrow things down to just one path – the optimal path to solving your problem.

Paul O'Neill's turnaround of Alcoa is an example of a problem solved by taking an optimal path. His turnaround is one of a kind in business history because he focused intensely on just one thing, the health and safety policy, to improve his company's performance. It was an ingenious solution to an old business problem.

But the most ingenious part was the decision to hire O'Neill, a policy specialist with a long career in government, to lead the business turnaround of an aluminium giant. All previous Alcoa CEOs had been aluminium specialists who started at a factory and worked their way up through the ranks to get the top job. So it was a highly unorthodox and risky decision by the board of directors to hire an outsider who knew nothing about selling aluminium. O'Neill's complete lack of experience in the industry raised eyebrows of Wall Street analysts and shareholders alike when he was first announced as the new CEO. He was the first outsider to ever be hired by Alcoa in their ninety-nine-year history and his profile didn't exactly fit.

Or did it?

O'Neill's predecessor, CEO Charles Parry, also tried to transform and modernise Alcoa. Sadly, Parry passed away in 2004, but in his obituary Vincent Scorsone, then a group vice president, said this:

"We got work rule changes we wanted to make Alcoa world competitive. It was very important to us because we were saddled with old contract language that kept us from modernizing the workplace ... That was a very, very important thing that happened on his watch."

(Work rule is an industrial action in which workers do only the bare minimum required by their contract to slow down production. It's a softer type of strike.)

Now, Charles Parry did many good things at Alcoa, so it was surprising that his trusted lieutenant mentioned stopping workers from striking as Parry's crowning achievement. Clearly, the fractured company had a serious internal political crisis on their hands at the time. And who was the best person to solve a political crisis? It was probably someone with substantial experience in politics, policy and mediation. Paul O'Neill's background ticked all of the boxes.

But the board didn't have to hire a policy specialist. They could have hired a finance specialist instead. A finance guy would have focused on cost-cutting and maximising profit because that's what most finance guys focus on: money. Alternatively, the board could have hired an HR specialist who would have probably started by looking at hiring and firing, because that's what HR specialists do. Or they could have hired a production specialist who would have tried to overhaul production. There was also the option of hiring an engineer who would have made his quest all about technology. Incidentally, Charles Parry was an electrical engineer at Alcoa before his tenure as a CEO. His turnaround strategy was acquiring high-tech companies and developing new high-tech materials. Technology is what engineers do.

O'Neill was a policy guy, so he started with the policy. And the policy worked so well for Alcoa because it was the optimal path to solving their political crisis, which technology, cost-cutting, or firing people wouldn't have solved.

* * *

Every problem can be solved with the right solution. To find the right solution for the job, you need to narrow down your search criteria to just the one.

Let's go back to the dating example and see what happens if you don't choose one search criterion. This time we'll use two search criteria, "successful" and "kind", to come up with solutions.

As you can see, the options that you find for "successful" criteria are completely different to the options you find for "kind". In fact, they directly contradict themselves.

Of course, it's always tempting to look for someone who is successful, kind, tall, funny, and a good father at the same time. But in reality, searching this way is akin to Alcoa's board of directors trying to hire someone who is an accountant, policy specialist, HR guru, production whiz, and engineer to boot. Where do you find a CEO like that? And more importantly, what managerial experience will give you the optimal path to turning around the company?

Defining one search criterion is critical. It's a lens that lets you zoom in on the most important thing to achieving your goal. This lens approach mimics the way we process information in general. Our brain functions according to the principle of least action. It tries to minimise time and effort on processing the information because it doesn't have unlimited capacity. In order to do this, it focuses on important things only at any given time which narrows our visual and mental attention. For instance, here is an illustration of how our attention works when it comes to visual processing, in this case reading.

Our visual attention is a lens that zooms in on the most important elements and ignores everything else. The same goes for our other senses, as well as thinking. But it also means that if you let your brain zoom in on the right element, you'll start noticing the right solutions. In contrast, you won't see the right options if your attention is focused on irrelevancies.

Going about your search the right way will help you avoid long detours on your journey to achieving your goals. Why take a long road if you can find the shortest route from point A to B by focusing on the right path?

Your search behaviour in life defines what you achieve, so it's worth picking your search criterion carefully. But if you find it difficult to choose a main search criterion, you can use various methods of sizing. You can size your criteria based on a scale, say from one to ten, or use T-shirt sizing – small, medium and large. Also, you can size your criteria by the most/least or by the time it takes – hours, days and months.

There are other interesting examples of how people size what's important to them. In her book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying, cleaning guru Marie Kondo proposed a novel way of deciding which things in your house you should keep and which things you should get rid of to avoid clutter. The core of Marie Kondo's method is to look at an item in your house and ask yourself, "Does it spark joy in me?" If the item doesn't spark joy, then it's probably not that important and her recommendation is to get rid of it. Kondo's philosophy is a great way to cleanse your life of old rubbish that's holding you back.

A similar approach was proposed by the mythologist and self-help author, Joseph Campbell, who suggested using the "Follow your bliss" principle as a way to find an optimal path in life.

So you might want to ask a similar question when sizing your criteria or options. Does this criterion make me happy? Do I feel really good about this one and less good about that one? Let the gut decide. And once you've identified the main one, prune all the rest. Repeat sizing and pruning if you still have criteria of the same size. The aim is to end up with just one criterion that will channel your search in the right direction.

* * *

Now that you understand the value of the main search criterion and its importance to mapping the optimal path to your goal, let's look at different ways to come up with options.

# 9

There is no beauty without some strangeness

Milton was a tough kid.

The seventeen-year-old was lying in bed, looking in a mirror and waiting. The night before, he had asked his mother to put the mirror by his bed so he could see the sunrise in the reflection the next day. It was meant to be the last sunrise of his life.

Earlier that week, a family physician diagnosed Milton with crippling polio and told his parents that he was not going to make it. But what the doctor didn't know was that Milton would live for another half a century.

That morning, the paralysed boy was tired of waiting to die. So he summoned all his energy and focused on achieving just one goal – moving his finger.

By the time he went to college, Milton had re-learned how to use his arms. But he wasn't finished. When the summer vacation came, he bought a bus ticket to one of the canoe stations in the area to begin a solo 1,000-mile journey down the river with his legs not working. His parents objected furiously, but Milton wanted to take the plunge with no option to turn back. When he eventually made it home, he trained himself how to walk.

Some time later, Milton finished university with two degrees, medical and psychiatric, and went on to become Milton H. Erickson, the father of modern medical hypnotherapy.

Dr Erickson's speciality was getting people to do things that they didn't think they were capable of, without them realising. While he had an incredible power of suggestion, he would often cure seemingly unresolvable personal problems by coming up with ingenious ways to make people take the first step towards wellbeing.

At the height of his powers in the 1960s, Dr Erickson would lecture mesmerised medical students by telling them teaching stories. Until recently, his medical lectures were available only to a select few. But it's no longer so. So, let's listen to him talk about one strange cure he prescribed to his suffering patient.

I had a sixty-five-year-old man come to me who had suffered a little insomnia fifteen years previously, and his physician gave him sodium amytal. Three months previously his wife had died, leaving him alone living with his unmarried son. The man has been regularly taking fifteen capsules, three grains each – a dosage of forty-five grains of sodium amytal. He went to bed at eight o'clock, rolled and tossed until midnight, and then he would take his fifteen capsules, forty-five grains, a couple of glasses of water, lie down, and get about an hour and a half to two hours' sleep. Then he would rouse up and roll and toss until getting-up time. The fifteen capsules no longer worked since his wife died. He had gone to the family physician and asked for a prescription for eighteen capsules. The family physician got frightened and apologised for ever allowing him to become a barbiturate addict. He sent him to me.

I asked the old man if he really wanted to get over his insomnia – if he really wanted to get over his drug addiction. He said he did, and he was very honest and very sincere. I told him he could do it easily. In taking his history I had learned that he lived in a large house with hardwood floors. He did most of the cooking and the dishwashing, while the son did the housework – especially the waxing of the floors, which the old man hated. He hated the smell of floor wax, and the son didn't mind. So I explained to the old man that I could cure him, that it would cost him at the most eight hours' sleep, and that's all – which would be a small price to pay. Would he willingly give up eight hours' sleep to recover from his insomnia? The old man promised me he would. I told him that it would mean work, and he agreed that he could do the work.

I explained to him that instead of going to bed that night at eight o'clock he was to get out the can of floor wax and some rags. "It will only cost you one hour and a half of sleep, or two hours at the most, and you start polishing those floors. You'll hate it, you'll hate me; you won't think well of me as the hours drag along. But you polish those hardwood floors all night long, and go to your job the next morning at eight o'clock. Stop polishing the floor at seven o'clock, which will give you a whole hour for rising. The next night at eight o'clock, get up and wax the floor. You'll really polish those floors all over again, and you won't like it. But you'll lose at most two hours of sleep. The third night, do the same, and the forth night, do the same." He polished those floors the first night, the second night, and the third night. The forth night he said, "I'm so weary following that crazy psychiatrist's orders, but I suppose I might as well." He'd lost six hours of sleep; he had two more to lose before I cured him, really. He said to himself, "I think I lie down in bed and rest my eyes for half an hour." He woke up at seven o'clock the next morning. That night he was confronted with a dilemma. Should he go to bed when he still owed me two hours of sleep? He reached a compromise. He'd get ready for bed and get out the floor wax and the polishing rags at eight o'clock. If he could read 8:15 on the clock, he would get up and polish the floors all night.

A year later he told me he had been sleeping every night. In fact, he said, "You know, I don't dare suffer from insomnia. I look at that clock and I say, 'If I'm awake in fifteen minutes, I've got to polish the floors all night, and I mean it, too!'" You know, the old man would do anything to get out of polishing the floors – even sleep.

When Dr Erickson finished telling his stories, he'd go to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee. There, he would make small talk with his fellow doctors.

Quite often one of his colleagues would say, "Milton, you know, since we started talking I've been stirring my coffee non-stop. It's been fifteen minutes and I just can't stop doing it. Is that your handiwork?"

Milton would smile, look them straight in the eyes, and say, "Now. Do you want it to be my handiwork?"

# 10

Exploitation vs exploration

So, you've defined your goal and a main search criterion. It's time to start your search for options. But what is the best way to come up with these options?

Let's begin by looking at the field where finding options is the name of the game: a board game, to be exact.

In the game of Go, finding the best option, or the most promising move, is paramount. Go is a strategy board game invented in China more than 2,500 years ago and is believed to be the oldest board game continuously played to the present day. It's also notoriously difficult. For instance, after the first two moves of a chess game, there are 400 possible next moves. In Go, there are close to 130,000.

In the world of Go, there is one prodigy player that stands out among the rest. It's an artificial intelligence program called AlphaZero, created by a subsidiary of Google, DeepMind. Lee Se-Dol, a human and the second best Go player in the world said this about playing against an earlier version of AlphaZero – AlphaGo:

"It made me question human creativity. When I saw AlphaGo's moves, I wondered whether the Go moves I have known were the right ones."

This sentiment was echoed by other top Go players, who called AlphaZero's ability to play "alien". It was making moves that were previously unheard of: moves that didn't make any sense until the game was over and AlphaZero claimed another victory. When AlphaZero beat a string of top Go players and later chess masters, the rest of the world scratched its head just like Lee Se-Dol and wondered how AlphaZero became so creative?

The answer lay in AlphaZero's search algorithm. At the heart of the algorithm was one simple concept of exploitation and exploration. To illustrate what AlphaZero did in the simplest way, let's take making toast as an example.

Imagine for a second that you are playing a game of making toast. What would be your best moves? If you were given a minute to think and you had some experience with cooking, then your moves would look something like this.

After trying some of these moves, you would discover that the toaster is the quickest and easiest way to make the toast (yes, the microwave takes longer). It then would become an optimal move in your mind, so you'd be keen on exploiting it in every toast game because you know it works like a charm based on your cooking experience.

When artificial intelligence scientist developed the first game-playing programs, they were thinking along the same lines. In a way, they tried to teach the machine how to cook. They taught the program all the cooking methods and how to apply those methods in various cooking situations. They tried to teach the program the human method of exploiting good moves. But this approach had limitations against humans, mainly because we already cook pretty well. We are also good at exploiting known promising moves, so the programs struggled to win.

But the AlphaZero developers tried a different approach. They didn't tell the program anything about the toast, cooking, or cooking methods. Instead, they just gave it basic rules for making the toast – apply heat to bread. Then they set the algorithm to explore various methods of applying heat to bread by playing against itself. Without being restricted by prior game knowledge, the program was free to explore a multitude of heating methods on its own.

Similarly, if you forget about your cooking experience for a minute and think about making the toast in terms of just applying heat, you'd probably come up with some of these moves.

Using this approach, you'd have quickly discovered that it takes about fifteen seconds to make a piece of toast using a blowtorch, as opposed to over a minute using a toaster, or a microwave, or any other obvious cooking method. In the end, you'd have discovered that the blowtorch is an odd but supremely effective winning move in the game of toast.

In a similar way, AlphaZero also found new combinations of unexpected and effective moves, "blowtorch" moves so to speak, when it played against itself without the bias that comes with previous experience. When it had finished learning the moves, the opponents simply didn't stand a chance with their old ways of playing the game.

The key to AlphaZero finding creative, lateral moves was the "explore" part of the program's algorithm. It made the program explore new moves at random. And even though AlphaZero found good moves to exploit after just a few games played against itself, it didn't stop exploring. It kept on trying new moves every game it played. Five million games in a row.

Going back to the toast example, it's unlikely that you will be queuing at hardware shop to buy a blowtorch for your toast anytime soon. Most people's natural reaction is to think, "I still prefer the toaster to the blowtorch." Obviously, the blowtorch is an exaggerated and playful example, but it does highlight the problem. Our minds instinctively want to stick with and exploit comfortable and familiar ways of doing things, which stops us from exploring much better options. We put ourselves at a disadvantage by trying to steer clear of anything new and strange.

New and strange options can be difficult to accept. When AlphaZero played against human players, its unorthodox playmaking wasn't particularly elegant or easy to digest. The humans were puzzled at AlphaZero sacrificing important chess pieces when it didn't have to, just so it could get a better position in the future to checkmate an opponent several moves down the line. AlphaZero's game wasn't pretty. But although it played in an odd way, there wasn't a single player in the world who honestly thought they could beat AlphaZero's strange new game.

* * *

There is nothing wrong with taking the beaten path, but if you want lateral thinking, then you have to explore new horizons to synthesise even better, optimal paths. It's good to pick random, unorthodox, unfamiliar and downright kooky options from time to time. The story of Milton Erickson's insomniac is real-life proof of this.

To begin with, Erickson had a clearly defined goal set by his patient. Also, Erickson came up with a main search criterion for his treatment – make the man tired, which is a cue for sleeping. But then, when he thought about different options, he didn't stop at easy, conventional ones. Instead, Erickson picked a kooky option of waxing floors in the middle of the night. It was a brilliant choice because there is nothing more physically and psychologically taxing than doing a hated chore after a hard day's work. The man had no choice but to lie down. It was just a question of when.

Exploring random new paths will supercharge your quest of achieving your goals. It's the answer to lateral thinking, which will help you unblock your mind when you are stuck with the same old problem, getting the same old results.

So if you end up with same old options in your life, perhaps it's time to break the problem down to its most basic components and then add a few unconventional options to the list. The key is not to dismiss odd options and paths that may not be obviously related to the subject you are searching for. The more unconventional, lateral knowledge you have, the more creatively you will be able to connect the dots.

So now that you know about the value of exploring new paths and how to generate lateral thinking on demand, let's look at how to start working with the method.

# 11

Bucky

"Kiss your child and go," a seasoned teacher would say to parents dropping off kids on their first day in kindergarten. Lingering parents only made things worse, so the teacher blocked the classroom door with her body so no adults could enter.

The separation anxiety was tough on the parents but their anxiety didn't compare to what the children had to go through. The first day in kindergarten could be scary and unpredictable, but even worse if your name was Buckminster.

The teachers tried to ease the tension, the incessant crying, and pleas to see parents with "Circle Time". They would gather children in a circle and start by singing songs about greeting the day and each other, and about the seasons of the year. Then they would explain the kindergarten rules. But little Buckminster was having none of it.

"Bucky" wasn't like the rest of the children. During the snack time, while everybody was quietly eating, he would announce things like, "I don't like water because I'm a fan of taste," or "The bananas came from the tropicals," and the teacher's favourite, "Feed me sausages or I'll die." When the teachers would hustle everyone inside after the break, Bucky would kick and scream to stay outside a little longer. When kids played with water in the sink, splashing it all over the place, the teachers would say, "Save some for the fishes!" and the children would stop. But Bucky would reply that he couldn't see any fishes and continued to spray water everywhere.

The only way to shut Bucky up was to put him at a separate table and let him play construction. The boy was nearly blind so he loved touching and putting things together with his hands. The teachers knew this so they would give him toothpicks and semi dried peas to build things.

* * *

"What's going on here?" shouted Miss Mueller.

"Bucky is building the biggest structure in the world, Miss Mueller!" shouted back the children.

In the middle of the swarm sat Bucky. Proudly, he explained to the class that he had started to build a house using little squares made out of peas and toothpicks but then the squares started to crumble under the weight of his structure.

"So I smashed it!" Bucky slapped the table in exuberance. Then he waved a triangle made out of peas and toothpicks and announced, "A triangle is stronger than a square and I can build giant buildings with it. All the way up to the moon."

His words were met with excited approval.

"Okay, children, back to your seats!" said Mrs. Mueller. Even during his quiet playtime Bucky was disrupting the class. Those poor parents, she thought. That little imbecile is definitely trade school material. Little did she know that one day Bucky would become a president of Mensa, the largest and oldest society for people whose IQ score is in the 98th percentile or higher.

* * *

After attending Milton Academy, Bucky was accepted at Harvard. But he was expelled from Harvard shortly after for spending all his money partying with a vaudeville troupe and "excessive socialising". Later he was readmitted, only to be expelled the second time for his "irresponsibility and lack of interest".

After his stint at Harvard, Bucky served in the Navy and came back to a job in a meat-packing factory. A few months later, his first daughter, Alexandra, was born. She was a great kid who took after her daddy. She was the apple of his eye. He had a house, a family and the future looked bright. But then in 1922, things went wrong.

"Daddy, am I going to die?" Lexie would ask Bucky as she suffered in excruciating pain from spinal meningitis and polio complications.

"Oh pumpkin, don't say things like that. Of course not!" Bucky protested with unwavering confidence in her recovery.

But a few weeks later, Bucky buried his daughter, came home, tapped the grave dirt off his boots, and started drinking. When he wasn't drinking, he would work with his father-in-law on their joint construction business aimed at providing solid, affordable housing. It was something that Bucky was passionate about because he always thought that his daughter died due to the damp and draughty conditions they lived in.

When his construction business failed, Bucky ramped up his drinking. After another all-nighter, he stood on a pier looking out at the deep waters of Lake Michigan. He was a bad swimmer, so he knew it would take but a couple of minutes for him to drown. As Bucky readied himself to jump, something inside told him that ending things this way wouldn't bring Lexie back. He realised that he had had enough of death, so he stumbled home and decided to quit drinking and dedicate himself to saving lives and helping others.

* * *

In 1951, Bucky was stuck. Now working as an architect, he was struggling with a problem of how to build a structure that could provide vast amounts of living space but would cost only a fraction of a regular building.

One day he was sitting in the kitchen and his second born, Allegra, walked in.

"Daddy, I'm bored," the doe-eyed six-year-old said.

Bucky thought for a second and then took out some peas and toothpicks from the kitchen cupboard. "Let me show you a little game I used to play when I was your age." He speared a few peas with toothpicks and built a triangle. "This is a triangle: it's much stronger than a square. Using this we can build a reeaaally big house for your dolls—"

Bucky froze.

* * *

When Buckminster Fuller presented his geodesic dome at the 1954 Triennale in Milan, it was an instant sensation. The architects from around the world recognised the value of Bucky's structure. His geodesic dome consisted of triangles that formed a tall, round roof. The genius of Bucky's design was that using symmetrical triangles made the structure remarkably strong. The load was distributed evenly so the mammoth dome didn't collapse under its own weight. It didn't require much material or construction time either. The dome was not only lightweight, but also incredibly cheap. But the best thing about Bucky's dome was that it provided an unprecedented amount of square footage that could easily accommodate thousands of people. It was a remarkable solution. The geodesic dome was, and still is, one of the largest clear-span structures a man can build.

In 1964, TIME magazine wrote how "the famed domes of Bucky Fuller have covered more square feet of the earth than any other single kind of shelter. U.S. Marines have lived and worked in them from Antarctica to Okinawa." The article went on to say "More than 50 companies have taken out licenses to make them in the U.S. alone. The small domes are light enough to be lifted by helicopter, and they practically build themselves."

Bucky went on to do many other great things. But later in life he was more famous for his motto "do more with less" than his architectural achievements. Bucky was the embodiment and the voice of the motto. To illustrate his point he would often tell people a story of a ship problem he solved once.

In Bucky's day, the ships were getting bigger and bigger every year. But despite their enormous size, they all depended on a small rudder at the back to steer them. The trouble was that even this small rudder required tons of engine power to turn it. So Buckminster proposed a simple solution. He attached a tiny flap to the rudder. The tiny flap would change the direction of water flow behind the ship ever so slightly. The water pressure created by the flap would turn the bigger rudder and then the whole ship would turn. Bucky would explain that it was this tiny flap that steered the entire giant ship, using almost no effort at all.

"Do more with less," Bucky would say to anybody who'd listen.

# 12

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step

Every journey begins with a single step. It's best to do more with less when it comes to first steps, which begs the question: what is the easiest yet most effective first step towards any goal?

Bucky Fuller's story holds the clue.

Bucky took the first step towards inventing his extraordinary geodesic dome in kindergarten. His dome solution was unique but not just because he invented a way to build large living spaces.

As I mentioned earlier, Bucky was nearly blind. In fact, his vision was so bad that he refused to believe that the world wasn't blurred when he was a kid and preferred to rely on a sense of touch instead. This makes the geodesic dome the rarest type of invention. It's an example of a complex problem solved using the sense of touch.

Vision is a wonderful thing to have but those of us blessed with functioning sight rarely think about it. About 80% of what we learn from the world around us is due to perception, learning, and cognition enabled by vision. The next two senses, touch and hearing, can receive information less than 20%. So it's not surprising that vision plays a central role in problem solving, particularly when it comes to mathematical problems.

It's a heartbreaking fact that mathematical achievement tends to be low for blind children. As a result, visually impaired young adults are underrepresented in sciences at a college level and beyond.

The challenge with maths that the blind face can be easily illustrated. You can just close your eyes, ask somebody to read you this primary school equation, and try solving it without using your vision.

57 + 593 + _________ + 57 = 2,052

Using your eyesight, you could just type the numbers into a calculator and see the answer in seconds. If you don't have a calculator, then you could break down the problem on a piece of paper. (When asked what her employer did for a living, one maid of a famous mathematician said that he wrote on pieces of paper all day, crumpled them up, and threw them into the wastebasket.)

But the visually impaired can't use paper as easily. The blind mathematician, Emmanuel Giroux, said this about using Braille, a writing system of tactile symbols for visually impaired:

"To write, one must punch holes in the paper, and to read, one must turn the paper over and touch the holes. Thus long strings of calculations are hard to keep track of."

Also, the standard Braille system was not intended for technical material. It didn't provide representations for the most common technical symbols. Even numbers were represented by the codes for letters (a = 1, b = 2, c = 3, etc). Then, Abraham Nemeth, a blind mathematician, invented the Nemeth code for mathematical symbols. But the Nemeth code is not easy to learn. So blind mathematicians have to resort to other means of solving problems.

When Lawrence Baggett, a blind mathematician from University of Colorado, solved problems, he rarely made Braille notes. Instead, he mostly calculated in his head. "I try to say it aloud," he said. "I pace and talk to myself a lot."

Baggett would also say that there was nothing unique about his ability to calculate in his head. He'd say that sighted mathematicians could do this too, adding, "but it's handy to write on a piece of paper." To illustrate his point, Baggett would tell a story how he once went to Poland in winter. There was a power cut and the lights in the lecture hall went out. It was pitch black but the lecturer didn't stop his presentation. "And [the lecturer] did integrals and Fourier transforms, and people were following it," Baggett said. "[But] it proved a point: You don't need the blackboard, but it's just a handy device."

A similar visual challenge was encountered by an Argentinian mathematician called Norberto Salinas. Salinas's father, a civil engineer, lobbied his friends in the mathematics department of the University of Buenos Aires to let his son take the examination to enter the university. Eduardo Ortiz, the examiner, recalled that Salinas had to communicate graphical information by drawing pictures on the palm of Ortiz's hand, a technique that Ortiz himself later used when teaching blind students.

Thankfully, computers and Braille touchscreen devices have opened up a new world of possibilities for blind people. But there are challenges with computers too. Programs that turn text into spoken word don't cope well with mathematical symbols, so some blind mathematicians only using them for reading email and surfing the web instead of reading the latest research papers. Plus, a lot of math research doesn't come in audio format.

The challenges that extraordinary blind mathematicians have to face highlight the importance of eyesight to problem solving. Frankly, it's unlikely that mathematics would even exist if it weren't for eyesight. So unless you are a savant, it's unrealistic to think that you can solve complex problems in your head alone. Even savants first wrote problems down, then looked at them to solve them. Einstein certainly did. So whatever your problem is, it's best to take advantage of possibly the greatest problem-solving tool you have in your arsenal: vision. It's best to write the problem down and solve it visually.

Start by writing down your goal. Make it short and sweet, like this.

Then come up with several search criteria by asking the question: I want to (insert a goal: get rich) and it's important to me that (list things that are important to you: who, what, where, why, when, how). Then rate and trim your criteria to just the one.

Next, search for options based on your main search criterion. Start with your own knowledge to come up with as many options as you can. When you run out of your own ideas, tap into the knowledge of others. It's best to start by consulting an expert in the field, as this will give you fast access to useful and relevant information. Then tap into the public knowledge. Explore odd options or options that are not obviously related to what you are looking for. They may inspire you to come up with better solutions. Generate as many options as possible.

Select one option and follow the optimal path you mapped out.

By the way, you can break down the option further until you reach a solution you are happy with.

* * *

All complex problem are best solved in writing. If you start writing things down, a solution or at least a hint will emerge, one way or another.

But let's be frank. Writing things down is not as easy as it sounds, because of one sneaky problem that's best summed up by this limerick.

I'm really determined and keen,  
To start giving this house a spring clean.  
I will do it I say,  
Yes, I'll do it today,  
Well, I'll do it tomorrow, I mean.

Being inspired to do something is not equal to actually doing it. Many journeys never start or start too late because taking the first step is hard. I know because it took me several months to sit down to write this book. There was always tomorrow, that mystical place where 99% of human productivity and achievement is stored. So I know first-hand that writing things down is not easy, not to mention following through on the solution. At the start of any task, we all have to face the capricious elephant in the room that is motivation.

Motivation is one of the most researched subjects in psychology. An overwhelming amount of research exists on motivation, so it's surprising that nobody came up with a practical and bulletproof solution to not having it yet, and it doesn't look like the solution is coming anytime soon.

The issue with motivation lies in the word itself. Motivation comes from the word "motive", or a reason to do something. The motive is simply a cue that triggers an action.

Motivational cues are straightforward when it comes to our basic human needs like thirst, hunger or sleep. You feel hungry; you eat. A few hours of fasting and you have no trouble motivating yourself to raid the fridge. Your body has all sorts of built-in cues to tell you that it needs food. And if you ignore the hunger cues long enough, you'll die, so the drive to eat is strong.

But what is a motivational cue for writing? It's not a basic human need. Nobody ever died from not writing. In fact, you can live the rest of your life perfectly well without ever touching a pen. Your body won't complain. The motivational cue for writing is so weak it's almost non-existent, which means the motivation to write is low.

The trouble is that most complex endeavours linked with success and self-fulfilment don't have a strong motivational cue, so we struggle to maintain the motivation to pursue them. However, there are ways to amplify weak motivational cues. One way is to let others manipulate your rewards and punishments. For instance, you could give a friend £5,000 and tell them to keep the money if you don't finish the book in three months. Or you can get someone to pay you £5,000 for every page you write. The motivation to write the book would go up in both cases.

Rewards and punishments are two reasons why we still go to work even when we are not feeling motivated to do so. There is a tangible financial reward for going to the office that we depend on. Also, there is an immediate punishment for not going.

But self-motivation is another matter because there is no one around to nudge you into doing things. You either have to rely on your own willpower or set reminders to stay motivated.

Reminders is an interesting topic. A social psychologist from the University of Alberta, Andrew Harrell, who researched accidents among children, designed an unusual experiment to see how well caretakers look after their children to prevent them from getting into trouble. Eight hundred and sixty-two caretaker-children pairs were observed in fourteen different supermarkets. Caretaker neglect was measured according to how often the caretakers or their children, between one and seven years old, wandered out of sight or were more than ten feet away from each other, too far to prevent most accidents.

What Harrell discovered was surprising. Throughout the experiment, a small percentage of caretakers lost sight of their children, but women who didn't wear a wedding ring lost their children 35% more often than women who did, and men without a wedding ring lost sight of their children a whopping 80% more often. It was an unexpected outcome which raised the question, "Why would a wedding ring make such a difference?"

Around the world, the wedding ring is a reminder of commitment to family, which is not taken lightly. We go through an important ritual to put the ring on and it signals to ourselves and others that we are motivated to stay with our partner till death do us part. Whether we know it or not, the ring impacts our behaviour and motivation in the long run. It serves as a reminder to persevere with our relationship and take care of our family the best we can.

Reminders can be an effective tool when it comes to motivation if used correctly, as two behavioural scientists from Harvard and Wharton, Todd Rogers and Katherine Milkman, can attest. Rogers and Milkman discovered that we don't follow through on our good intentions because we lack self-control or simply forget to act on them. So they devised a novel experiment to see if they could enhance people's motivation through reminders.

In their experiment they asked their researcher to give out discount coupons outside a coffee shop. The coupon promised $1 off any purchase, but the discount was only valid in two days' time. When the researcher gave out the coupons to the first group of people, he told them, "We'll see you in two days' time on Thursday, remember to use the coupon on a cash register". But then he told the second group of people, "We'll see you on Thursday. There will be a colourful stuffed alien sitting on a cash register to remind you to use the coupon."

The stuffed alien did the trick. It nudged the customers into using the coupon. In fact, 41% more customers acted on the "alien" offer. And when Rogers and Milkman did a similar experiment by sending aliens to remind people to make online donations, 91% of people sent money. Rogers and Milkman called their approach reminders-by-association.

Reminders-by-association is a simple idea but it has far-reaching consequences for public policy, for instance. It can save lives by getting more people vaccinated or make you vote and pay your tax on time. But it can also be used to enhance self-motivation. Of course, there are no guarantees when it comes to self-motivation, but a meaningful and unconventional reminder could have a real impact. That's why both the wedding ring and the stuffed alien had a subtle yet pronounced influence.

* * *

It's worth giving visual problem solving and reminders-by-association a shot. But before you start writing things down and come up with a motivational reminder to achieve your goals, there is one last thing to consider.

# 13

Smooth as silk

"Take your clothes off and get on stage," barked Amber.

Abigail took a deep breath and followed the group of cashiers, medical records clerks, travel consultants, unemployed mothers of two, and other aspiring strippers to the podium.

This was the moment Abigail had been dreading all day. It was the reason she'd asked for $12 dollars for a new bra from her parents. They were happy to give her the money because the teacher told them she did a great job on her Nelson Mandela essay. But Amber was no Mandela. She was an older dancer auditioning the strippers for Silk, a club tucked away at the back of an industrial park accessible through a blacked-out glass door with the sign No Fat Women Allowed!

Three disinterested minutes later, Amber said, "That's enough," and motioned for the women to leave the stage. "Hey, blue eyes." She looked at Abigail. "Fake tan. High heels. Give me a stage name."

"Um... Scarlett?" Abigail said, trying to think of something classy.

"Taken. You'll be Opal."

Later that day Opal showed up at the club's opening time. The club was empty so she had to sit and wait for the moment when a few hundred strangers would be staring at her pale skin and awkward dance moves. Just like on the beach, Opal reassured herself, trying not to think about the fact that she would soon have to appear stark naked onstage.

* * *

"Hey Opal, give us a lap dance!" shouted a suit over the booming music.

It was her sixth dance of the night and by that time Opal had her fifteen-minute routine down pat and was oddly enjoying it.

There were benefits to working for Silk. The clients were showering her with compliments and any lingering body issues she had quickly went away. Also, Opal loved the dressing room camaraderie. Amidst clouds of hairspray and body glitter, the girls would share the most intimate details about their life, chatting to each other without closing the toilet door, and making arrangements to live together. But what Opal liked the most was the money. She was stunned when the floor manager gave her a big pile of $20 notes. She'd made $420 in one night.

The following night, Opal got off the bus and cheerfully walked towards the club. When she strolled onto the club's parking lot it was empty, dark and quiet. The cheap neon Silk sign with an animated go-go dancer so bright it could be seen from space was switched off. Opal looked around, scanning the empty darkness, then sped up to the club entrance. As she approached, she noticed there was no muffled music sipping through the front door. She pulled the handle. The door was locked. She pulled again. She pushed the door a couple of times and banged on it to no avail. Then she pressed her face against the glass and peeked inside. There were no signs of life.

Opal took out her phone and dialled Amber.

"Blue eyes, you gotta go easy on the drugs," Amber rasped in the voice of someone who had just woken up. "What do you mean the club is closed?"

Opal started to explain that there was no one at the club again.

"Alright, alright. Call Brendan," Amber told her.

"Who?" asked Opal.

"Who? Who? Brendan Beals. The club's owner, silly."

* * *

"Hey, who's the new girl?" Brendan Beals peered through his office window at the podiums, where girls were hanging upside down on poles with their legs spread eagle.

"Oh, that's the latest gemstone in our collection. You know we have Amber, Crystal, Ruby. That one is Opal, I think."

"She's money. Move her to the front podium, will ya." Brendan waved his floor manager off. Lately, he had a lot on his mind. The business wasn't doing well. His customer base was dwindling thanks to baby boomers dying out. The new generation preferred computer games to sticking dollar bills in their mouths for girls to pick up with their body parts. The only way to stay afloat was to raise the mark-up on the drinks. In six months Brendan went from 150% to 300% mark-up, but the pundits weren't stupid. They were simply buying fewer drinks for the girls.

Brendan also had to spend money on the club. Back in the olden days, the girls would say "I'm going to the champagne room," which would be a code name for "Give me some privacy because I will be performing sexual favours for the client in a private room." A bouncer would patrol the area every ten minutes to make sure the women were safe. But recently, he had needed to install an expensive video surveillance system after a few girls complained about physical abuse.

Brendan tried to work around the cashflow problems by keeping two spreadsheets: one for the tax people, and one for cash earnings like VIP room takings and dancer fees. All cash with the unofficial spreadsheet was deposited in his safe. Once a week, Brendan would open his safe and take the cash. He would then shred the cash spreadsheet just in case. But every day the stash in the safe was getting smaller and smaller. Then to add insult to the injury, fate came knocking on his door.

"You! Stay where you are!" shouted the undercover cop dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and faded khakis. A few seconds later, a wave of police officers flooded the club yelling something incoherent. When the shouting and pointing stopped, the handcuffing began. The girls pleaded with cops to let them put on some clothes but nobody listened. An hour and a half later, the cops marched everybody, stark naked or otherwise, outside, where newscasters were already waiting to report about the latest sting against the morally corrupt.

"Your club is in violation of the city's nudity ordinance, sir," a fresh-faced lieutenant said to Brendan.

"Motherf—" swore handcuffed Brendan.

* * *

After the raid on his club, Brendan Beal's mind was preoccupied with one thing only – saving his club. It was 3 pm and he still hadn't brushed his teeth. He sat on the couch and stared at the ceiling, thinking about moving his club to another state. He rolled a joint, took a couple of deep puffs, and looked at city's ordinance paperwork on the coffee cable.

"Let's see...Legalese. Legalese. Bullshit legalese. Some more legalese." Brendan flipped through a few pages. "Wait a minute..." He flipped back one page, re-read it, and grinned like a Cheshire Cat.

The next day was busy. Brendan got on the phone with an art supplies dealer and ordered several boxes of artist-grade sketchbooks for same-day delivery. He also asked for two boxes of coloured pencils, pastel drawing sticks and rubber erasers. Then, he called his floor manager and asked him to make a few changes to the club's interior and remove old marketing material from the tables and walls. At 9 am, he spoke with the printers and asked for 2,000 A5 flyers and three A0 pastable posters. Straight after, he called Amber and told her that the girls' shifts would start at 9 pm.

At 8 pm, Brendan was at the club, briefing his entrance staff to scrap the cover charge and ask the arriving pundits to pay for a goodie bag that included a sketch book and drawing supplies instead.

When Brendan re-read page 5 of the city's ordinance he'd noticed three little words obscured by paragraphs of various legal clauses. It turned out that the city actually allowed public nudity provided it had "serious artistic merit".

* * *

At 9 pm, Silk the art destination opened its doors to aspiring "artists". The posters and flyers promised an 'art night' and invited everybody to nude sketching workshops. There were only three entry requirements. One, you had to really like nudes. Two, you had to keep buying alcohol. And three, you had to pay money for the entrance, drinks, and private VIP "sketching".

A few weeks later, Brendan's business was booming.

"Tell Opal to grab a bottle of champagne and come to my office," Brendan told his lackey. Then he sat and thought about all the other clubs in the city that had to close and smiled. Brendan chuckled at his own ingenuity and remembered his booze-hound dad, who would often repeat the old saying: "Lead me not into temptation. Oh, who am I kidding? Follow me – I know a shortcut!"

# 14

Add a little magic

Brendan's story is an example of a clever solution to a dead-end problem. But it's also a cautionary tale. In March 2006, Brendan Beals pleaded guilty to three misdemeanour charges as a result of violating the city's anti-nudity law. There was no happy ending for him after all. (Names have been changed in the interests of privacy.)

There are certain dangers with fetishising money, fame, success and achievement as another young man, this time from California, found out.

In the 1960s, there was a boy named James. Some children envied James because he was free. Free to do whatever he wanted and go wherever he pleased. He was never told what to do by his parents. There was no strict dinner time, no alarm to tell him to go to school, and no bedtime.

James used his freedom to stay out as late as possible. This way he didn't have to see his mother lying in bed depressed all day after another suicide attempt. Or run into his father, who would drink all their money away and disappear for days only to come back to shout at his family and throw things around the house.

When he wasn't out, James liked to lock himself in his room and travel to the world where everything was possible: the world of magic. Every day, he would religiously practise different magic tricks and techniques. He would toss marked cards and turn nickels into dimes. But his favourite trick of all was to pull a scarf out of a fake thumb to impress his imaginary audience. He loved his fake thumb. It was his most prized possession.

One day, James lost his beloved fake thumb. He searched high and low but it was nowhere to be found. Weeks later, when he had almost given up all hope, he stumbled upon a magic shop on the outskirts of town while riding his bike.

The door to the magic shop opened with the tinkle of a little bell. An older woman sat behind the counter, reading a book. She watched James as he walked around the shop, gazing at merchandise. Sensing his hesitation, she introduced herself and asked what he was looking for. James told her about the fake thumb and the amazing tricks he could do with it, if only he could find a replacement. Then he asked if the woman knew how to do the thumb trick. The woman replied that she didn't, but then she said that she didn't need to because she knew the greatest magic trick of all.

As soon as she said it, James was hooked. He desperately wanted to know what the greatest magic trick was, so he asked the woman if she could teach him. To his amazement, the woman agreed.

The kind woman spent many weeks teaching him the basics of her magic trick and when he was finally ready to learn its most important secret, she told him to bring a list of things he wanted most in life the next time he visited. But before he left the shop, she looked him in the eye and told him that he must open his heart when he wrote the list, or the trick won't work.

The next day, James brought his list.

- Not to get evicted from home

- Go on a date with a girl

- Go to college

- Become a doctor

- A million dollars

- Rolex

- Porsche

- Mansion

- Island

- Success

The woman frowned as she looked at his list. There was a long pause. Then she pointed at one of the items and said, "So you want to be a doctor?"

When James told her about an inspiring doctor who came to his school to give a speech, the woman smiled.

That day the woman revealed the secret behind the magic trick to James. "But remember, James. You must open your heart or it won't work," she reminded him as he left the magic shop for the last time.

It didn't take long for the magic trick to start working. Miraculously, James didn't get evicted from his home. Later, he got into college and into medical school against all odds by using the trick.

But as James started to become more sure of his place in the world, he forgot the magic trick and the woman's advice, closed his heart and listened to his brain instead. He elected to become a neurosurgeon, a brilliant and cocksure neurosurgeon. Even cocaine, parties, and scantily clad women didn't stop him from achieving his goal.

As time went by, James's head got bigger and so did his appetite for success. He worked tirelessly on acquiring more and more stuff. One day, when an opportunity to invest into a robotic radiosurgery start-up called Accuray presented itself, James seized it. He put his money in the company, quit his job as a doctor, and became a medical technology CEO.

A couple of years later, James woke up worth $75 million dollars. He had made it. He had everything he'd ever dreamed of. The Rolex, the Porsche, the mansion. He was in his forties and already making plans to retire on the private island in New Zealand that he was about to buy. Yet, James didn't feel like he was winning. Maybe because of his divorce and a non-existent relationship with his daughter. Or perhaps because of all the empty self-indulgences that came with being a hot-shot single millionaire. Nevertheless, the money kept rolling in and so did all the fabulous things that came with it to keep him occupied.

In 2000, the dot-com stock market crash caught everybody by surprise. As the crash unfolded, James watched his vast fortune take a tumble. All his money evaporated and overnight he found himself $3 million in debt. But he still had one asset left. Before the crash, he'd pledged to donate some of his company stock to Stanford School of Medicine. He'd put the stock into a charitable trust in which the school was the beneficiary. But the problem with the trust was that there was no option to get the stock back after James made the commitment. The money was locked in the trust and there was no way he could get it out.

James was bankrupt in more ways than one. The mansion, the private island, the fast cars and expensive watches were distant memories and so were his "friends". While sitting alone on the ruins of his glamorous life, he pondered his cruel fate. He remembered the scared kid doing magic tricks in his bedroom and suddenly the memory of the woman from the magic shop popped into his head.

The next morning, James got into his car and drove to the little town of his childhood to find the magic shop. But his trip was in vain. The shop and the woman had long vanished.

As James walked the familiar streets he reminisced about the hot summer days he'd spent learning the greatest magic trick of all. He smiled to himself. He had come such a long way, yet he had never left this place because he'd never embraced the trick's secret ingredient hidden in the woman's prophetic warning: "Open your heart or it won't work". He'd never truly opened his heart, just his brain.

Then came a phone call. It was James's charitable trust manager calling with some exciting news. It turned out the charitable trust's paperwork was never filed, so James was free to withdraw all his company's stock, $5 million of it, from the trust and sell it to settle his bills.

James listened to the excited trust manager rattle on about how he had an amazing chance to claim back his old life. But now James could see more clearly than ever before, because stuff was no longer getting in the way.

"Make the donation to the school," he told the trust manager.

There was a stunned silence on the other end. "Come again? James, are you sure?"

"Just make the donation."

As James hung up, he heard the trust manager say to somebody "Holy shit."

Stanford School of Medicine sold 398,400 shares of Accuray Inc donated by James Doty for $5.4 million. It remains one of the largest donations of any graduate ever received by the school. The money raised from selling James's shares went towards lifesaving research in neurosurgery, spinal cord injury and repair.

"Jim is a truly remarkable individual," said Philip Pizzo, dean of the medical school. "A highly successful physician-innovator and committed academic leader, he is also an incredibly honorable individual with admirable integrity. He has continued to commit his support even though his own personal wealth has unfortunately declined. We stand in awe."

But the donation was just the beginning of James Doty's story. Instead of wealth chasing, he decided to pass on the woman's magic trick to millions of other people. By the way, you can learn it too: just look for it. James will not only reveal the trick but he'll tell you the rest of his remarkable story, from receiving a $150,000 donation from the Dalai Lama to the amazing research that his team at Stanford is currently undertaking.

But the point of this story is not the trick. James Doty's story is not about sneaky shortcuts in life. It's about new beginnings. And it's also about good endings, which is why I picked it as the penultimate story in this book.

As I finished writing this manuscript and emerged from the "deep dark wood" of my own search for the answer to how to live an extraordinary life, I held this truth in my hand: life is all about paths taken and not taken. Our life is about endings and new beginnings. Where one path ends, another must begin. And there are countless paths in life: a path to better relationships, a path to being a doctor, a path for making a toast quicker, a path to designing a better product, a path to being a better mother, a path to improving the wellbeing of others, a path to being wealthy, a path to writing a creative book, a path to raising money for a dog charity, a path of being the life and soul of a party, a path of being responsible, a path of learning from a science heavyweight, a path of mesmerising people with magic tricks. We walk thousands of paths every day but the reality is that only some of them make us truly happy. There is an optimal path to fulfilment out there for all of us, every endeavour and every problem has an optimal path, but for some reason we leave it to fate to guide us through the fog of life. In truth, it's best not to rely on fate to show you the way. So the main point of this letter to you is that there will always be clever ways to live a life less ordinary, but they do require you sitting down and designing your own fate first. I did it and life never felt more right, now that I'm following my newly designed, strange and unfamiliar path of creativity.

But before you sit down and design your own fate, there is one more important consideration that goes back to James Doty and Brandon Beal's tales.

There will come a day when you'll have the strength to walk your optimal path, there is no doubt about it. But whatever path you take, whatever method you choose, go on your journey for the right reasons. There is nothing wrong with wanting more out of life, but it's worth remembering that you won't be able to plaster over deep emotional holes, anger, resentment, hatred and feelings of inferiority with achievement. If anything, the holes will only deepen when you get there. So, before you close your eyes and wish for something to come true, open your heart to love, altruism and compassion.

Live kindness a little every day and it will add magic to your journey.

# Epilogue

Kintsugi

If the world seemed a darker place that morning, if the birds weren't singing as sweetly, or the sun wasn't shining as brightly – it might be because Yoshimasa was depressed.

Normally, his concubine would wake him up in the early hours. He would put on a magnificent black silk kimono and start his morning walk along the garden path, admiring the luscious greenery, taking in the smells, and running his manicured hand along the branches of a Sakura tree. But not today.

Today he awoke in a foul mood. He motioned palace servants out of the way and strode outside to speak with a lowly courier standing outside by a horse.

The palace servants bowed, scurried out of his way, and wondered what was the reason for such odd behaviour. After all, Yoshimasa was a shogun, the title bestowed on great warrior-statesmen who wielded more power than the emperor himself. The shoguns didn't speak to couriers personally. That's what the help was for.

But the palace servants didn't know about the tragic events of last night. Last night, Yoshimasa broke his tea bowl.

* * *

Ashikaga Yoshimasa is a little known figure in the West. So it may come as a surprise that you've been influenced by him in more ways than you know.

Back in 15th century Japan however, Ashikaga Yoshimasa had never heard of the West. His focus lay on his precious flowers, his gardens, his art and, most importantly, his opulent palaces.

An anonymous contemporary of Yoshimasa wrote:

"In (1461), there was a great famine throughout the land.... An epidemic of many diseases was also prevalent. Two-thirds of the people died of starvation, and skeletons filled the streets. Nobody passed but was moved to pity. But the shogun at the time, Ashikaga Yoshimasa, had built the Palace of Flowers in the second month of 1459 and doted on the place. Every day he employed people to create (gardens with) mountains, water, plants and trees, laying out streams and stones. Showing no pity for those who suffered from hunger, he made plans to build still another new palace."

Fatherless Yoshimasa (his father was killed when he was five) was made the shogun at the age of thirteen and quickly became a puppet ruler who didn't care much about the affairs of the state. His personal calling was beauty.

Ironically, his unhealthy love of beautiful things gave birth to the Japanese aesthetic which today is the heart and soul of the country. Japanese clean, elegant, restrained and simple design philosophy started with Yoshimasa. It then travelled around the world, eventually reaching and influencing Steve Jobs. (Jobs was a student of Zen Buddhism and a big fan of sophisticated simplicity of the Japanese style. He was also the man who went on to create beautiful world-changing products using the Japanese design philosophy created by Yoshimasa.)

But Yoshimasa's love of beauty was only matched by his love of tea. The tea ceremony was, and remains to this day, a big deal in Japan. The ceremony, which has roots in Buddhism, is an art, a performance and a spiritual practice in the Land of the Rising Sun. So the shogun was deeply upset when he broke his cherished tea bowl.

That morning, he went outside and gave a package with the bowl to the courier. Most of the luxury pottery came from China back then, so the package was heading back to its creator in the Land of the Red Dragon for repairs.

When the bowl arrived back at the shogun's palace a few months later, no one was more ecstatic than Yoshimasa. He ran outside to meet the precious cargo, seized the package, which was tightly wrapped in Japanese washi paper, and ran back to his room. He lowered the package onto the table and unwrapped it.

"Nantekotta..."

The bowl standing on the table in front of Yoshimasa was not the same beautiful drinking vessel that he sent for repairs. The broken pieces were attached together with cheap metal staples, giving the effect of Frankenstein's monster's head, stitched by a blind man.

To add insult to injury, the bowl was no longer watertight, so boiling tea would seep through the stapled cracks and run down the shogun's soft hand.

At the time, Chinese craftsmen repaired all broken pottery using metal staples. The staples appealed to Chinese sense of taste but it was not Yoshimasa's cup of tea. He was not happy. Not one bit.

In despair, he summoned his best, most talented craftsman and laid down the law: Find a better way to fix the bowl, or else!

"I will find a way, master." The ceramics artisan bowed hesitantly and left without ever looking at Yoshimasa. Looking was against protocol.

When the craftsman returned to his studio, he was pale. He had no idea how to fix the bowl. Usually broken pottery would be chucked in a bin and a new, more beautiful creation would be presented to the shogun. But not this time.

Nonetheless, the craftsman was no slouch. Japan had one of the oldest ceramic traditions in the world, dating back to the Jōmon period, 1,000 BCE, which was passed down with great care from generation to generation. For years, the craftsman had simply observed his teacher at work. He wasn't even allowed to touch the pottery made for his master. During his apprenticeship, he would work day and night in exchange for little or no pay. But by the time the craftsman finished his apprenticeship, he was a pottery virtuoso.

Two weeks later, the bowl was ready. It was time for the artisan to face his fate. He walked into the palace with his knees buckling and presented his work to the shogun.

Yoshimasa picked up the tea bowl, lifted it to light and let the sunrays play on its surface. He regarded the bowl for some time with a stern eye. Then, he glanced admiringly at the artisan and nodded his appreciation.

The shogun was holding a piece of art. Instead of the wretched staples, the now stunning bowl was ingeniously fused together with molten metal which the shogun valued above all other materials: gold.

Yoshimasa tried to keep a straight face but deep inside he was astounded at the artisan's ingenuity. Using gold to fix pottery was something that had never been done before.

* * *

Since that day, Kintsugi, or the technique of repairing pottery with gold, was embraced by the Japanese people. Over the centuries, it became part of Japan's culture and national heritage. Today, Kintsugi pottery remains popular with artisans as well as collectors from around the world. It commands high premiums, so craftsman deliberately break ceramics just so they can fix them the Kintsugi way to increase their value.

But there is another reason for Kintsugi's unwavering popularity. Kintsugi is also a symbol for taking something old, broken or faded and turning it into something special.

# Notes

. Lewis, D., 2019. SAS Shadow Raiders: The Ultra-Secret Mission that Changed the Course of WWII. London: Quercus.

. Wired. 2007. LG Exec Says Apple Stole iPhone Design. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.wired.com/2007/02/lg-exec-says-ap/. [Accessed 24 January 2020].

. Zenas Fisk Wilber, Mr. Wilber "Confesses", Washington Post, May 22, 1886, pg. 1

. [Hil24] English translation from Bje03a, p. 17; Bje06, p. 2079.

. Wired. 1996. Steve Jobs: The Next Insanely Great Thing. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.wired.com/1996/02/jobs-2/. [Accessed 24 January 2020].

. YouTube. 2008. Steve Jobs: Good artists copy great artists steal. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0DUg63lqU&feature=youtu.be. [Accessed 24 January 2020].

. Feynman, R.P. Simulating physics with computers. Int J Theor Phys 21, 467–488 (1982)

. . George Kingsley Zipf., 1949. Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort. Cambridge, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Press.

. . Maupertuis, P. L. M., 1746. Les Loix du mouvement et du repos déduites d'un principe métaphysique. Histoire de l'Académie Royale des Sciences et des Belles Lettres, p. 267-294.

. Feynmanlectures.caltech.edu. 2013. The Principle of Least Action. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_19.html. [Accessed 24 January 2020].

. Forbes. 2019. Have We Learned The Alcoa 'Keystone Habit' Lesson?. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/roddwagner/2019/01/22/have-we-learned-the-alcoa-keystone-habit-lesson/#2c9d4ea258ba. [Accessed 24 January 2020].

. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. 2004. Obituary: Charles W. Parry / Retired Alcoa chairman known for sense of humor. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.post-gazette.com/news/obituaries/2004/07/04/Obituary-Charles-W-Parry-Retired-Alcoa-chairman-known-for-sense-of-humor/stories/200407040136. [Accessed 24 January 2020].

. Haley, J., 1984. Ordeal Therapy,. 1st ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

. Tech Times. 2016. Google's Artificial Intelligence Program Defeats World Champion Go Player To Win Tournament. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.techtimes.com/articles/141266/20160315/googles-artificial-intelligence-defeats-world-champion-go-player-win-tournament.htm. [Accessed 24 January 2020].

. AMS.org. 2002. The World of Blind Mathematicians. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.ams.org/notices/200210/comm-morin.pdf. [Accessed 24 January 2020].

. Stanford.edu. 2007. Former faculty entrepreneur sticks to his promise. [ONLINE] Available at: https://news.stanford.edu/news/2007/september26/med-doty-092607.html. [Accessed 24 January 2020].

. Japantimes.co.jp. 2016. Fifteenth-century shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa: Impotent or indifferent?. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/10/15/national/history/fifteenth-century-shogun-ashikaga-yoshimasa-impotent-indifferent/#.Xiseimj7RPa. [Accessed 24 January 2020].

## Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. 1 Seeing things that others don't
  3. 2 The search for lateral thinking
  4. 3 The method
  5. 4 Yin, Yang and the Game of Life
  6. 5 The principle of least action
  7. 6 Taking the optimal path
  8. 7 The one thing that really matters
  9. 8 If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change
  10. 9 There is no beauty without some strangeness
  11. 10 Exploitation vs exploration
  12. 11 Bucky
  13. 12 A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step
  14. 13 Smooth as silk
  15. 14 Add a little magic
  16. Epilogue Kintsugi
  17. Notes

## Landmarks

  1. Cover

