Expanding Your Mind: The Impact of Far-Analogies on Creativity
As we approach the end of January, a full 80% of us will ditch our New Year’s resolutions. Crazy right? And if you’ve travelled on the London Underground this month you will have seen a visually arresting series of ads promoting the wildly successful book, Atomic Habits by James Clear.
There’s one at Camden Town, that I have stood in front of regularly this blisteringly chilly January. In bright orange capitals it reads: You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.
Atomic Habits is all about trying to show you how you can prevent that 80% resolution drop-off. And it’s been in the New York Times bestseller list for 165 weeks. That’s over three years. Cripes.
But this isn’t a post about Atomic Habits.
This is a post about an 1890s French mathematician, theoretical physicist, and scientific philosopher Henri Poincaré, and Keith Holyoak, a Canadian cognitive psychologist born in 1950.
This a post about the power of analogies.
James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits is super candid about his writing process. If you listen to his guest appearance on the Tim Ferriss Show from earlier this month, Clear will tell you all about how he structured Atomic Habits by analysing dozens of successful books. From how he considered the title, to how long each chapter should be, he carefully assessed the success of other books and used what he felt would work.
In fact, Clear has been doing this since his high-school days.
When you read Atomic Habits there is one thing that Clear excels at: analogous anecdotes.
Or in simple terms: stories that are related to the topic at hand.
And he isn’t alone. Think back to any book of this type, and the best ones all follow this style: begin each new chapter with a short and compelling anecdote. It can be a scientific study, or a personal anecdote, or just a short story. Then go on to reveal how that anecdote connects to the subject being discussed.
But what makes Clear’s anecdotes so frickin’ great is that they aren’t just well written. They are analogous and original. Which is impressive. But that’s not enough for 165 weeks in the bestseller list either.
What also makes his analogous anecdotes so good is this: they’re far off analogies.
Born 132 years before James Clear, Henri Poincaré was often called The Last Universalist, a polymath who excelled at all his fields of study (maths, physics, philosophy, etc). During his lifetime he published three books, the last of which, “Science and Method” contains a fascinating chapter entitled “Mathematical Creation” (although he could learn a thing or two from Clear on how to write chapter titles, that’s for sure).
In this chapter, Poincaré writes at length about the power of combining two semantically distant ideas to result in the unlocking of a previously unsolvable problem.
‘‘to create consists of making new combinations of associative elements which are useful . . . . the most fertile will often be those formed of elements drawn from domains which are far apart’’ — Poincaré, (1913)
Poincaré may be talking about maths here, but at its core this is about creativity.
Fast forward 101 years, and Keith Holyoak was one of three researchers that together published a paper called “Far-Out Thinking: Generating Solutions to Distant Analogies Promotes Relational Thinking”.
The first page of their research cites Poincaré, and as the title of their research paper shows (spoiler alert), “creative innovations often involve nonrandom combinations of ideas drawn from disparate domains”.
They go further to conclude that “having people generate solutions for semantically distant analogies induces a mind-set that influences a different relational-reasoning task using unrelated materials”. Or, in plain English: far-analogies help you solve seemingly unrelated problems.
So what does this have to do with James Clear’s Atomic Habits? And what does it have to do with you?
Put simply: Clear’s anecdotes help you establish unbreakable habits.
The power of the anecdote is two fold:
The reader’s memory of a good anecdote will significantly outlive ANY other content from a book.
It gives the reader an “in” into a previously unknown topic.
But it’s #1 that holds the greatest benefit. This is because of what Poincaré (and Dijksterhuis more recently) referred to as “unconscious thought”.
We’re all familiar with unconscious thought, it’s what happens when you’re taking the dog for a walk, or having a shower, or lying in bed about to drift off to sleep. Suddenly, from seemingly out of nowhere an idea just pops into your head.
“But it is more probable that this rest has been filled out with unconscious work and that the result of this work has afterward revealed itself” — Poincaré, (1913)
In other words, the brain often uses these periods of rest to come to a solution to a given problem.
And if you’re consuming far analogous anecdotes, it’s more likely that your brain will make one of these seemingly unrelated connections at a time that you least expect it.
Finally, there is one more piece to the puzzle. Poincaré observed that this only works if you’ve put in the work beforehand to get “stuck". He firmly believed that you needed to commit the time to exploring every avenue you could think of. Then, and only then, would the unconscious work arrive.
It pays to pay attention to analogies. But reader beware, they are not all created equal. And abundance of mediocrity abounds.
I’ll leave you with a thought from James Clear himself:
“Almost every idea that you have is downstream from what you consume. We don’t usually think about it that way, but when you choose who to follow on Twitter, you’re choosing your future thoughts in a sense, you’re creating the information flow, what the timeline, what the feed is going to look like. Or when you choose what book to read or which podcast episode to listen to, you’re choosing the thoughts that are going to arise.”
— James Clear, 2023