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Women & Leadership Australia eNewsletterSeptember 2009 |
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Book review: Borrowing Brilliance
Publisher: Penguin Australia
More often than not, words like ‘brilliance’ and ‘creativity’ end up diminishing, rather than compelling, us forth. These words divide us into three groups. Those who live in possession of these traits deny having them. Those who fake having them end up living the life of con artists. And the majority of us who can’t approximate them just end up feeling inadequate. Researchers, however, know better. For many years they’ve been telling us that the ingredients for brilliance and creativity are much more complex than a simple gift of birth. Recently, these arguments have been popularized by Malcolm Gladwell, whose third book (following The Tipping Point and Blink), Outliers: The Story of Success demonstrated some of these complexities (read the review). In particular, he showed that the right upbringing and opportunities are next to crucial in order to allow sheer talent to thrive. These ideas can come as both a relief and a burden. The key message is that it’s never too late to begin the quest to be brilliant, to foster creativity. In Borrowing Brilliance, David Kord Murray takes Gladwell argument a step further. His aim is to dispel the misconceptions about creativity and reveal the fact that brilliance is borrowed. He reminds us that during Isaac Newton’s inquisition for stealing the ideas of calculus, the famous scientist declared, “In order to see farther, I have stood on the shoulders of giants”.Murray also takes us back to Shakespeare’s time, when creativity was seen as an improvement rather than originality. Helping us feel less troubled about the notion of stealing others’ ideas, Murray leads us elegantly through six key steps in his borrowing process. He defines the first three steps as the Origin of a Creative Idea. They include defining the problem you’re trying to solve, borrowing ideas from places with a similar problem, and combining these borrowed ideas. The last three steps are the Evolution of a Creative Idea. They involve incubating ideas, judging the strengths and weaknesses of the solution, and enhancing strong ideas while eliminating weak ones. In contrast to some of his heroes – such as Malcolm Gladwell and Edward DeBono – Murray’s debut book is less ambitious in its scope or challenge. But that lends it a certain strength. Borrowing Brilliance presents a singular message, teased out in step-by-step analysis. Given its lucid arguments, Borrowing Brilliance has scope to find wide appeal amongst the majority of us otherwise intimidated by the idea of brilliance.
Our rating: 9/10 By Ben Zipper, Co-editor, Women & Leadership Australia eNewsletter
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