The Creative Mind of Elon Musk

The Creative Mind of Elon Musk

             Named one of the world’s most powerful people (Forbes), Elon Musk is the CEO and CTO of SpaceX, CEO of Tesla, cofounder of Solar City, cofounder of Zip2, and founder of X.com that later became PayPal. Estimated to be worth around $14.2 billion dollars (Forbes), this self made man can attribute his massive success to the creative mind he possesses. As demonstrated by his reach in many facets of business and science innovation, Elon Musk’s mind stretches out far beyond a single domain but rather masters the elemental truths from varying domains to form an all-encompassing idea system that allows Musk initiate a wide paradigm shift in relatively the most important aspects of human life.

                                         

  

             At a young age, Elon Musk displayed a precociousness in computer programming and created a small scale video game at the age of 12 (Biography). As a result of this young genius, Musk was an outcast in his youth. This was overcome when he attended college and excelled at his academics at University of Pennsylvania where he earned a Bachelor’s of Science degree in physics. This success allowed him to proceed into a very successful career in business and scientific development.

            Musk has been ever present in the world of scientific creativity that allows for a fundamental shift in humans’ function in the world. SpaceX is a company created by Elon Musk after having made an impact with Zip2 and PayPal. SpaceX will usher a new age of space exploration for humankind by making space flight drastically less expensive and more frequent. Putting a lot of equity into this company when many didn’t see a substantial profit margin for the company’s mission, Musk jokes that “he used a large fortune in order to make a small fortune” (Ted Talk) because he so believed in an essential human need to become an interplanetary species. SpaceX would put to use a renewable rocket that would only incur a cost on fuel rather than the billions of dollars required for each flight on rockets currently used by government controlled space expeditions that can only be used once. This decreased cost and frequent flights of the SpaceX rockets will normalize space flight for humans and allow for human presence on other planets, implementing a new age for humanity as interplanetary.

                             

              Another company springing from the mind of Elon Musk is SolarCity. As opposed to SpaceX which is geared toward human presence on other planets, SolarCity is concerned with the effect human presence has on the earth. The consumption and burning of natural resources have had a detrimental effect on Earth’s environment and its reservoirs are rapidly depleting. To sidestep this impending global doom, Elon Musk is using SolarCity to mass produce solar panels for everyday consumer use. The idea is that a household can chose to buy a solar panel system or lease the system which is then installed making the house self-sustaining. The solar panel system will supplant the monopoly that ComEd and NicorGas has created. Consumers will no longer pay utility bills from these companies but rather pay a leasing fee from SolarCity, which is shown to be less that paying your average ComEd bill. This will lessen the financial burden of consumers as well as decrease our dependence on fossil fuels.

                                 

                                 

While Musk has said that he attributes his success by simply “working a lot” (Ted Talk), mere hard work cannot encapsulate the basis of Musk’s phenomenal success in varying domains of innovation. In an explanation of his method, Elon Musk says that he observes all that he approaches through “physics fundamental thinking” (Ted Talk). Believing all things have an elemental truth to them that can be explained through the universal. Musk shows adeptness at abstracting the complex in science, design, and business and synthesize all these aspects into an industry of his own (Ted Talk), this sounding quite similar to the creative cognition theories illuminated by Steven M. Smith and Thomas B. Ward as an insight to the pathways of a creating brain. This reach across the varying domains has allowed Elon Musk to elicit change in the way humans are living as well as human mindsets on how we should be living.

Sources:

Thomas Bernard. Ward, and Steven M. Smith. Creative Cognition: Theory, Research and Applications. Cambridge, Mass: MIT, 1996. Print.

https://www.ted.com/talks/elon_musk_the_mind_behind_tesla_spacex_solarcity#t-1218234

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk

http://www.biography.com/people/elon-musk-20837159#early-life

Lucianne Walkowicz: Reaching for the Stars

In my search for the perfect blog post topic, I scavenged dozens of Chicago business websites for creative and innovative individuals. I wanted the work of the chosen person to be accessible to me. I came across astronomer Lucianne Walkowicz from the Adler Planetarium.  Upon a preliminary investigation of Walkowicz, I found three TED talks, each relaying the importance of astronomy and a relation to other areas, the hook I needed to start my research.

Ted Talks

2011: Finding Planets Around Other Stars

2012: Look Up for a Change

2015: Let's Not Use Mars as a Backup Planet

As an astrophysicist, Walkowicz has accomplished a significant amount in her field. She has worked on space missions including the Hubble Space Telescope and NASA’s Kepler Mission (as discussed in her TED Talk). She is also collaborating to develop the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. While these examples demonstrate Walkowicz’s intelligence and admiration within her field, her projects are not the reason I chose her. Walkowicz is a creative individual who is fueled by intrinsic motivations, similarly to my creative, Picasso. According to Gardner, intrinsic motivation means: “creative solutions to problems occur more often when individuals engage in an activity for its sheer pleasure than when they do so for possible external awards,” (Gardner, 25). Like Picasso, Walkowicz has been overwhelmingly successful in her endeavors, so external reward has played a role in her work. However, the two were driven by the passion of their field to produce results, rather than the possibility of recognition.

As an individual with Undergraduate, Masters, and Doctorate Degrees in Physics, one may assume that Walkowicz only interacts with those as educated as herself. The truth is quite the contrary. Her creative “idea” is to make science accessible. According to Creative Mornings: “[Lucianne] works to empower people from all walks of life through scientific discovery, fostering interdisciplinary collaborations, mentoring students and developing citizen science projects that put the tools of discovery in anyone’s hands.” As an example, in 2016, Walkowicz led the “Adler Galaxy Ride,” a bike ride from Chicago to St. Louis, representative of distances in space. The group put on free fun science events in cities and towns along the route. Walkowicz also keeps a blog that frequently connects astronomy to other fields, one of her most recent post called: “Martin Luther King Jr. & Astronomy for #MLKDay.” 

The extent that astronomy can connect to other fields is only limited by her own creativity. 

Walkowicz even discusses climate change in her talks about other habitable planets in the universe and how the two can work in conjunction. The purpose of all of her advocacy is to demonstrate how precious our planet is and how future minds will be forced to find ways to save it. When interviewed by the Chicago Tribune, Walkowicz discussed the importance of her work: “(At Adler,) I think that we can play a role in making science more accessible for everyone. That can actually profoundly influence who thinks of themselves as future scientists or who thinks of themselves as being able to access science.” 

To Fidget or Not To Fidget?

Fidget. The word itself just doesn't sound right. Yet we've all been guilty of it, whether it may be clicking a pen during class, tapping one's foot rapidly, or literally just doing about anything with our hands. However, what if there was an invention created to help us fidget? At first, it makes no sense, but that's the creativity of the fidget cube!

Basically, the fidget cube is a...wait for it.... six-sided cube! I know, mind-blowing right?! However, it doesn't have the look of a regular cube. Each side is designed to represent a regular item that people fidget with. For example, one side has five buttons, of which three click, imitating a pen. One side has a joystick, another has a switch, and the other three sides are likewise similar. On the other hand, it can’t connect to Wi-Fi, it can’t act as a real pen, it isn’t a fun puzzle to solve; at first, it just seems to be another toy that is of no use. However, this cube has gained a lot of interest from various people. How much interest? Oh nothing much, only about $6,465,690 on Kickstarter, making it the 9th most funded item on the website. No big deal right?

The fidget cube is the brainchild of Matthew and Mark McLachlan, brothers who have innovated a line of products (albeit none as successful as the fidget cube). Incredibly enough, they started working on the fidget cube based on their past experiences with fidgeting. Both brothers were almost always moving around and playing with things at their desks when thinking. One day, they recognized the potential of an invention based on their fidgeting, and started checking out the items they fidgeted with. They saw that they were basically kids objects, brightly colored and cheap, which lead them to see the future for a professional fidgeting device. I think this really highlights something called the path-of-least-resistance theory (Ward, 1994, 1995), which says that when people make new ideas, they first get characteristics of items they know of and then add on to it. The fidget cube is a great example; the McLachlan brothers took items from everyday life and interwove them into one cube. I want to point out that while this may not be a big-C creative idea (I mean, this isn’t the next iPhone), it’s cool to see how an original idea can be made from several other ideas. Creativity doesn’t always have to come from something that’s completely new; it can literally be right in front of us.

By the way, believe it or not, there actually is a market for the fidget cube! Why? Matthew and Mark both passionately believe that fidgeting is a way for people to think innovatively, and if used properly, it could lead to new discoveries in real life. In this way, the fidget cube is used to focus this fidgeting and help people start to think more creatively. Still skeptical of this? There have actually been many studies about how fidgeting can actually boost memory, focus and creativity, and according to the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, it can make you healthier. More importantly, the number of ADD, ADHD, autism, and other diagnoses have increased a lot in the past decade, so this fidget cube may definitely help those people focus and create more. In neuroscientist Nancy Andreason’s “Secrets of the Creative Brain”, creative people said that their creative ideas usually happen during Random Episodic Silent Thought (aka when they were RESTing). If fidgeting could help others funnel their creativity during resting or thinking moments, that could expand the limits of creativity to who knows where! Whatever the case, this cube will be released in a few weeks, so its impact could either be amazing or a failure. Do you think the fidget cube will deliver to its promise?


Sources:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/antsylabs/fidget-cube-a-vinyl-desk-toy
http://www.adweek.com/creativity/story-behind-fidget-cube-4-million-phenomenon-you- didnt-know-you-needed-173491/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestreptalks/2016/10/17/kickstarter-craze-mclachlan-brothers- raise-6m-for-a-vinyl-desk-toy-for-fidgeters/#705defb23af3
http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/fidget-cube-kickstarter/