The Zero Some Game
By Peter LloydUnlike the universe, creative people never create from nothing. But the closer you get to starting with a blank slate, the more original your ideas. To create, innovate, or invent on a truly cosmological scale demands godlike discipline, patience, and unwavering trust that creation got it right. That everything comes from nothing. Could that be why every scientific theory or creation myth you visit begins with a lot of nothing at takes place nowhere?
Start Nowhere
The next time you or one of your fellow problem solvers complains, “We’re getting nowhere!” take heart. Assure them that the real breakthrough waits around the corner. Remind them and yourself that problem solving is a kind of Zero Some Game. When you hit Zero, you’re about to get Some.
When creative problem solvers, artists, inventors, and innovators work, nowhere makes a good place to start. Nowhere can be anywhere as long as it’s not where you’ve been before. Creation began nowhere. Every explorer we glorify ventured into the unknown. What would they have discovered if they had not? More of the same, of course.
They all chose the hard road to nowhere. Each had to silence the gnawing anxiety that warned them, “You’re wasting your time. Your peers outpace you. You’re going to end up nowhere. Just settle for less.”
Eliminate Everything
The universe burst from nothing. Nature continues to churn on uncertainty. The more you know where something is, the less you know about its motion. This insight and others help define how nature shapes the universe.
The heavens you see above in the darkest nights did not spread out completely evenly at the Big Bang. According to Jim Al-Khalili of the University of Surrey, the embryonic universe carried the template, or what he calls the DNA, of what we see today.
Clumps developed into galaxies, galaxies into solar systems, and here we are. Everything from nothing. The DNA cannot be altered. It’s still unfolding. So go with it. Repeat it. To problem solvers that means, drain the swap of what you think you know. Eliminate all assumptions, beliefs, inclinations, prejudices, and approaches you’ve taken that have failed, until you’re left with nothing. At this zero point, you have the most possible options, possibilities, and opportunities. And the best kind—fresh, clean, untainted, and therefore, new-to-the-world ideas. Most of them will be crap but none small, mediocre, or derivative.
Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.