The start is kinda funny and true: not all child prodigies grow up to excel as adults.
The problem, as I see it, is that the public likes to focus on the obvious, whereas innovation, and thinking, are not spectator sports. The products might be interesting, but the process isn't.
The reason this video smells like an advertorial is because it is! David Epstein is plugging his book, Range, and his ideas about lateral thinking - itself nothing new as was promoted extensively by Edward de Bono since the 1960s.
The huge irony here is that de Bono was a prodigy! "He went to University at 15 and qualified as a doctor at 21. A year later he went as a Rhodes Scholar to Oxford and by the time his first book, The Use of Lateral Thinking, was published in 1967, he was Assistant Director of Research in the Department of Investigative Medicine at the University of Cambridge."
The flexibility of mind and the search for new answers works both in fields that are deep and narrow as well as those that require pulling large amounts of knowledge from different areas.
The question isn't whether to be a specialist or a generalist, but rather, "What do I want to know?" The engine that drives lateral thinking is innate curiosity.
the brain is so wonderfully plastic that it seems a waste of energy to use it just to think literally.
;-)
The real world is a wicked learning environment no matter how repetitive life seems. When I skimmed through your text I really thought you were talking about Bono from U2. It was when I played the video I got it was "Edward de Bono" the creative thinker. This is the first time I heard abut his work and I'm glad you mentioned him.
lol. de Bono's books were pretty famous when I was a student, so as I watched that video, I thought: this is just a copy, and without giving credit!
Mind you, try being creative in most jobs and you'll be fired.
there are some innate qualities - although I've yet to find a better word, I'd class such people as "neuro-sensitives". Not sensitive as in precious or weak, but like a sensitive instrument, that reacts and processes weak signals.
I spent a year teaching "creative thinking" and is really hard work for students who are not naturals. They told me it was by far the hardest course they'd ever done at school - mainly coz it wasn't just a read-memorise-regurgitate. lmao.
I started reading "The Teaching of Creative Thinking" by "de Bono" and I liked the way it started by using some logic puzzles, but then I put it down. I will pick it up again off and on. It will probably take me a month to go through it.
OK, that brings up one issue not often covered in creative thinking = motivation!
"Why bother?" is itself a prompt that can cascade through the different methods to eventually - hopefully - generate some non-trivial answer.
I found it useful to cure depression - make it worse, first! Dig up the whole garden till you hit bedrock. lol.
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It's the opposite of tunnel vision and dogma I'd say and an excellent ground for dot connecting. Specialization and compartmentalizing is the enemy of truth finding.
needs both - to zoom in and pan out - and sometimes to peer over the garden fence and spy on the neighbours.