March 2016

THE VALLEY BUSINESS JOURNAL
30 www.TheValleyBusinessJournal.com
March 2016
“Books are the training weights of the mind.”
-Epictetu
“My best friend is a person who will give me
a book I have not read.”
~Abraham Lincoln
sA book is a device to ignite the imagination.”
~Alan Bennett
Book Review
“How to Think Like Einstein”
by Scott Thorpe
Right in front of your
nose.
That’s where you usually
find the solution to sticky
problems: always right there,
where you weren’t necessarily looking.
This time, though, there’s no
easy answer, no matter how much
you ponder and pick but if you read
the new book “How to Think Like
Einstein” by Scott Thorpe, you
could become a genius at things
like this.
Ever since revealing his Theory
of Relativity in 1905, Albert
Einstein’s held a special place in
science, history, and culture. E =
mc2 and Einstein = genius.
That was true in the early
years of Einstein’s career: fresh
out of university, he was alight
with “truly revolutionary thinking”
but, alas, the fire waned
as he got older. “He was still
brilliant,” says Thorpe, but Einstein
didn’t do the kind of work he did
when he was a lad. Thorpe blames
Einstein’s growing knowledge and
his decreasing willingness to “break
the rules.”
And that, Thorpe says, is what
made Einstein so darn smart: he
was happy to ignore conventional
wisdom and get out of “rule ruts.”
Though we are trained to heed rules
in life and in work, breaking them, he
claims, is the “universal principle”
for thinking like a genius.
Wrestling with the unsolvable
starts with writing the problem as a
statement that “focuses your mind.”
Identify why you want the problem
solved and what you’ve already tried
to do. What are the “rules” that might
govern this issue?
Once you’ve identified the problem,
“create a better one” by “resizing”
the conundrum, making it
simpler, and changing your attitude
towards it. Try to look at it differently,
then write it down again.
Journal your ideas, and remember
that there are no “bad ideas”
when problem-solving. Learn methods
to escape those irksome rule ruts.
Know how to bust rules and “ignore
inconvenient facts.” And finally,
keep in mind that “Mistakes are
essential to growing ideas.” Don’t
make them on purpose but don’t
discount them, either.
Sometimes, it’s too easy to get
too close to a problem, which makes
it impossible to get past the issue. “How
to Think Like Einstein” might help. And
then again, it might not.
I thought it odd that author Scott
Thorpe puts the gist of his entire book
on the bottom of the very first page:
“…you’ve got to break the rules.” You
know everything you need to know right
there; what follows is just enhancement
for those six words. It also struck me
that problem-solving often doesn’t have
the luxury of time, of which Thorpe’s
process demands a fair amount.
Readers do receive a nicely-varied,
well-researched wealth of interesting
illustrative anecdotes, but they were
more entertaining than helpful in the
immediate raison d’être of this book.
I think there’s goodness here – in
particular, an entire chapter of group
exercises for breaking out of the “rule
ruts” - but past that, help is going to take
some serious digging.
Indeed, the solutions you’ll find in
“How to Think Like Einstein” are not as
plain as the nose on your face.
Though we are trained to
heed rules in life and in work,
breaking them, he claims, is the
“universal principle” for thinking
like a genius
©2015, Sourcebooks $16.99 / $22.99 Canada 272 pages