Invent the Method of Invention. Just Think It Backward

Invent the Method of Invention. Just Think It Backward

Charlie: “Alfred North Whitehead correctly said at one time that the rapid advance of civilization came only when man ‘invented the method of invention.’ He was referring to the huge growth in GDP per capita and many other good things we now take for granted. Big-time progress started a few hundred years ago. Before that, progress per century was almost nil. Just as civilization can progress only when it invents the method of invention, you can progress only when you learn the method of learning. I was very lucky. I came to law school having learned the method of learning, and nothing has served me better in my long life than continuous learning. Consider Warren Buffett again. If you watched him with a time clock, you’d find that about half of his working time is spent reading. Then a big chunk of the rest of the time is spent talking one on one, either on the telephone or personally, with highly gifted people whom he trusts and who trust him. Viewed up close Warren looks quite academic as he achieves worldly success.”

Mr. Brown: “And reading is not everything, right? How you get an idea and knowledge to use to have a practical implementation? Let us call it a personal education story. How you get started?

Charlie: “Next, my personal education history is interesting because its deficiencies and my peculiarities eventually created advantages. For some odd reason, I had an early and extreme multidisciplinary cast of mind. I couldn’t stand waiting for a small idea in my own discipline when there was a big idea right over the fence in somebody else’s discipline. So, I just grabbed in all directions for the big ideas that would really work. Nobody taught me to do that; I was just born with that yen. I also was born with a huge craving for synthesis. And when it didn’t come easily, which was often, I would rag the problem, and then when I failed, I would put it aside, and I’d come back to it and rag it again. It took me twenty years to figure out why and how cult conversion methods worked. But the psychology departments haven’t figured it out yet, so I’m ahead of them.

“But anyway, I have this tendency to want to rog the problems. Because World War II caught me, I drifted into some physics, and the Air Corps sent me to Caltech, where I did a little more physics as part of being made into a meteorologist. And there, at a very young age, I absorbed what I call the fundamental full attribution ethos of hard science. And that was enormously useful to me. Let me explain that ethos.

“Under this ethos, you’ve got to know all the big ideas in all the disciplines more fundamental than your own. You can never make any explanation that can be made in a more fundamental way, in any other way than the most fundamental way.”