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Thanks for Nothing

By Peter Lloyd

In my previous two Workouts, I offered three steps for applying the power of nothing to creative problem solving, invention, and innovation: Start nowhere. Eliminate Everything. Let the Vacuum Create.

I’ve proposed that the nearer we come to starting our creative enterprises with a blank slate, the more original the results. Let me illustrate this proposition with examples of two practices based on nonsense or nothing. Before reading, you might want to review The Zero Some Game and Making Nothing Work.

Chiropractic
If you’ve ever left the chiropractor’s office, as I have, freed from wrenching back pain, walking without a cane, you’ll understand why I hesitate to call the foundation of this practice nothing.

Early practitioners believed that “interruptions in the flow of innate intelligence, a vital nervous energy or life force” caused all disease, not just back pain and sore muscles. Such an interruption or vertebral subluxation could be adjusted with manual manipulation of the spine, joints, muscle, or tissue.

Despite the nonsense at its core, chiropractic treatments often work. In addition, practitioners emphasize a holistic approach to health care, including exercise and healthy lifestyle. A sorely needed emphasis in a field accused of too often pushing pills.

Accupuncture
Even less grounded in reality, the power of nothing underlies the practice of inserting sterile needles into the skin along imaginary meridians in order to aid the flow of qi, or nothing. No anatomical or scientific evidence has ever emerged to support the existence of qi or meridians. Nevertheless these concepts remain central to the practice of acupuncture. And it works!

Placebo effect, you say? Who cares! Accupuncture has been around long enough to demonstrate that it’s not doing harm, unless you substitute it for necessary medicine. Antidepressant drugs also express strong placebo effects.

The Key to Making Nothing Work
While it’s technically impossible to create from nothing, the closer you get to starting with nothing, the more original your results. If you want to be original, don’t imitate. Start nowhere.

More often, though, you will want to pick up where the best left off and improve something. But even then, go boldly, abandon your assumptions, ignore your naysayers, and remember—the less you know what you’re doing, the more original you’ll be. Language was invented by illiterates, chemistry by alchemists, and religion by atheists.

Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.