Читать книгу Non-Obvious 2017 Edition - Рохит Бхаргава - Страница 40

Jeff Karp is a scientist inspired by elegance … and jellyfish.

As an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, Karp’s research focuses on using bio-inspiration—inspiration from nature—to develop new solutions for all types of medical challenges. His self-named Karp Lab has developed innovations such as a device inspired by jellyfish tentacles to capture circulating tumor cells in cancer patients, and better surgical staples inspired by porcupine quills.

Nature is filled with elegant solutions, from the way that forest fires spread the seeds of certain plants to the way termites build porous structures with natural heating and cooling built in.

Ian Glynn, author of the book Elegance In Science, argues that elegant proofs or theories have most or all of the following features: they are simple, ingenious, concise and persuasive; they often have an unexpected quality, and they are very satisfying.

I believe it is this idea of simplicity that is fundamental to developing elegant ideas. As Einstein famously said, “make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

Being elegant means developing your ability to describe a concept in a beautiful and simple way for easy understanding.

A good example of things described beautifully is in what talented poets do. Chances are you don’t spend much time with poetry. That is a missed opportunity. Great poetry has simplicity, emotion, and beauty because words are taken away. Poets are masters of elegance, obsess over language, and understand that less can mean more.

You don’t need to become a poet overnight, but some of these principles can help you get better at creating more elegant descriptions of your own ideas.

For example, think back to the last time you encountered something that was poetically written. It may have been something you once read in school, or perhaps a Dr. Seuss book that you read to a child at bedtime.

Dr. Seuss in particular had a beautiful talent for sharing big ideas with a simplicity and elegance:

 “Today you are you, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is youer than you.”

 “A person’s a person, no matter how small.”

 “Everything stinks till it’s finished.”

We love to read or see elegant stories and we delight in their ability to help us get the big picture with ease, but they do not seem quite so simple to develop or write. If you have ever sat down with paper or in front of a computer screen and tried to tell a simple story you know that it is not an easy challenge.

But we all have the power to simplify our ideas and share them in more elegant ways. To illustrate how, let me take you behind the scenes of the process I used in previous trend reports to name my trends.