I got off the plane at Shannon Airport in County Clare, Ireland, and noticed two clocks at either end of the main lobby. They disagreed, by about five minutes. I mentioned this discrepancy to a baggage handler, and he wasted no time teaching me an important lesson in creative thinking.

“If they both gave the same time,” he said, “we wouldn’t need two clocks, now, would we?”

I like that kind of thinking. It’s so much healthier than logic. Because it allows for ambiguity. If you can live with ambiguity, you can deal better with contradiction, which is everywhere. And the better you can deal with contradiction, the more in tune you are with the universe, which is basically chaos.

You may have noticed that creative people seem to have an appetite for chaos. And that’s good. Otherwise, boredom would soon set in and lull us all into a permanent coma. People would start conforming, following their leaders blindly, like lemmings. Never stopping to ask, “Are we sure jumping off this cliff is going to be positive experience?”

If you follow lemming logic, though, you have to jump with the crowd, because if you don’t, all your fellow lemmings will die in vain. Your self destruction gives their sacrifice purpose. Right? No! It’ dead wrong, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard such nonsense used to justify the continued pursuit of a failing enterprise. In some cases the supporters of lemming logic are not stupid. More often they use lemming logic to cover their more sinister and self-rewarding motives.

Lemming logic can be very persuasive. It can be used to kill creative ideas that could improve our lives. I’ve devoted an entire page of quotes from people—some otherwise creative giants—who have pronounced with great inflated confidence the impossibility of revolutionary ideas simply because they go against the lemming-like flow of current behavior. Here are just a few:

• The bomb will never go off. I speak as an expert in explosives.
  —Admiral William Leahy, U.S. Atomic Bomb Project
• The talking motion picture will not supplant the regular silent motion picture. There is such a tremendous investment to pantomime pictures that it would be absurd to disturb it.
  —Thomas Edison, 1913
• Radio has no future. Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. X-rays will prove to be a hoax.
  —William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, English scientist, 1899

In the face of such well meaning wrongness, creative people have to persist not only in the pursuit of new ideas but in the rational defense of their ideas. To begin, we must be prepared to go against the grain. Take heart from the fact that your brain comes equipped with a unique point of view. And it’s only natural for you to see things differently.

Make the most of this ambiguity. Just don’t expect people to appreciate your originality. It would be dangerous if they did. Because, to paraphrase the Irish baggage handler...

“If we all thought the same way, we wouldn’t need more than one brain, now, would we.”

See also: Ambigamy by Jeremy Sherman, Psychology Today

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