A More Beautiful Question (20 page)

How can you learn to love a broken foot?

Test-and-learn doesn’t sound all that painful. However, baked into this approach of acting on questions via constant experimentation is the near certainty of failure—and not just one failure, but quite possibly many, each bringing some level of disappointment if not actual pain.

Van Phillips tried many prototypes of his prosthetic foot, starting off full of hope each time—and ending, in some instances, on the ground, his broken foot beside him. Yet none of this slowed his progress. As Winston Churchill once said, “The trick is to go from one failure
⁶⁵
to another, with no loss of enthusiasm.” But how does one learn to perform that “trick” of “failing enthusiastically”?

“Every time a prototype breaks, it’s heartbreaking,” Phillips said. But it’s also an opportunity:
How do I learn to learn from failure?
The answer is, through questioning. Rather than run from a failure or try to forget it ever happened, hold it to the light and inquire,
Why did the idea or effort fail? What if I could take what I’ve learned from this failure and try a revised approach? How might I do that?

Stanford University’s Bob Sutton says that
⁶⁷
when analyzing a misstep, in addition to asking what went wrong, you should also ask,
In this failure, what went
right
?
(Conversely, when you try out something and it seems to have succeeded, look for what went wrong or could have been better, Sutton says. The best learning comes from looking at successes and failures side by side.)

In analyzing a series of setbacks, a key question to ask is
Am I failing differently each time?
“If you keep making the same
⁶⁸
mistakes again and again,” the IDEO founder David Kelley has observed, “you aren’t learning anything. If you keep making new and different mistakes, that means you are doing new things and learning new things.”

In sharing early versions of an idea with the world at large, one is likely to receive negative feedback—which some people interpret as evidence of a failure. But that’s not necessarily true, says Harvard’s Paul Bottino, who points out that when it comes to feedback, “dissonance can actually be more valuable than resonance.” As people push back on your idea, it can be a good indication that you’re entering uncharted, potentially important territory—because you’re more likely to get negative feedback (“That could never work!”) on ideas that challenge common assumptions. “Dissonance is the most misunderstood kind of feedback,” Bottino says. “We really should welcome it and learn to make the most of it.”

As Bottino points out, it’s critical when taking on a challenging project to know how to solicit outside input and help, and to know how to engage with potential advisers, supporters, and collaborators. If you’re pursuing a truly ambitious question, you probably can’t answer it alone. Collaborative inquiry begins with asking others
,
Do you find this question as interesting as I do? Want to join me in trying to answer it?

The Internet and social networking has made it easier to find and connect with those who share our interests—and who may be exploring similar questions and challenges. Even if they’re not, you might still be able to stoke their curiosity and garner their support.

Jack Andraka could not have gotten far with his question—
What if we could create a simpler, faster screening test for pancreatic cancer?
—without help. He particularly needed materials and tools with which to conduct experiments—he needed a lab. Andraka had gotten some early dissonant feedback from his own parents and brother, who thought his idea “would never work.” But he forged ahead anyway. He gave form to his idea by laying out a basic plan: “I wrote up a procedure, budget, and timeline—that was really just trying to get a concrete representation of my idea,” he said. Then he e-mailed “anyone in my area who knew something about pancreatic cancer,” including experts at the National Institutes of Health, at Johns Hopkins, the University of Maryland, and others. His outreach to two hundred people brought more dissonant feedback. “Some of them just said, ‘This won’t work.’ Others went through each and every step of my procedure saying this was wrong and that was wrong. It was pretty harsh.” But one professor saw an intriguing possibility in Andraka’s overarching question, as well as his more technical one (
What if I exposed a single-wall carbon nanotube with an antibody to a protein overexposed in pancreatic cancer?
). That professor responded, “‘Yeah, sure, it might work,’” Andraka recalled. More important, the professor opened up his lab to Andraka.

How do you fit a large golf course on a small island?
⁶⁹

When pro golfer Jack Nicklaus was hired in the 1980s to design a golf course on Grand Cayman Island, he faced a difficult challenge: The island, a mere six miles wide and twenty-two miles long, was too small to accommodate a full-size course. In his first whack at the problem, Nicklaus and his team cleverly designed a nine-hole course that can be played twice from different tees. Still, golfers couldn’t shorten their swings, and balls were too easily sailing out into the surrounding water. At this point, instead of continuing to focus on the size of the course, Nicklaus reframed the problem:
What if golf balls didn’t travel as far?
After heavy testing and research, Nicklaus and the MacGregor Golf Company developed the limited-flight “Cayman ball,” which drives half the distance of a regular golf ball with the same amount of swing. Small island hotels and backyard duffers everywhere rejoiced.

The teenager had never been in a professional laboratory before. “I was like, ‘Wow, this is a centrifuge!’ It was like being in a candy shop.” But as Andraka began running tests, he started to experience failures. “In the first month I blew up the cell that I was carefully growing,” he said. “Nothing was working.”

Andraka’s success came slowly, step by step, as he broke down the overall challenge into smaller problems and questions. With each solution, he could proceed to the next question. The first obstacle—Andraka’s attempt to optimize the antibody he wanted to use in his paper sensor—stymied him for three months, but he kept tweaking the experiment until he found his antibody. Then he started working on his carbon nanotubes. Then he had to figure out how to combine the antibody and the nanotubes in his sensor. Finally he had to test it to see if it could detect pancreatic cancer. After seven months, he was done.

Asked about the experience of getting through the How stage—dealing with real-world complications, failures, lack of progress—Andraka recalled, “I would say coming up with the question—that’s fun. Then arriving at a theoretical solution is even more fun.” Then, as he was testing and learning in the lab, there were extreme ups and downs, he said. “At certain points, I was starting to think, ‘Maybe all of those people are right. I’m a fifteen-year-old. What do I know about cancer?’”

But finally getting to an answer “is the best experience you can ever have.” Andraka used the word
elegant
to describe the solution he arrived at—an odd word for something that looks like a mundane paper-strip test kit. “It’s pure elation that you found this elegant way to solve a problem.”

How might we create a symphony together?

That a fifteen-year-old kid with a far-fetched idea for detecting cancer could send out a batch of e-mails and thereby gain full access to a world-class lab shows that resources exist to aid in tackling almost any problem, and that people will help if you just ask (and ask well: Andraka had a powerful question, buttressed by a reasonable plan).

As the
New York Times
observed in an article headlined “Don’t Know How? Find Someone Who Does,” today anyone with a good idea can easily link up with experts who can help develop the idea, build it, and, when it’s done, figure out what to do with it. “When we think of inventors,”
⁷⁰
the
Times
’ Nicole LaPorte wrote, “we think of a solitary soul hunkered down in a basement lab for weeks or months before emerging to claim an unshared victory.” However, the reality is that “drawing on other people’s experience and resources” is often far better than going it alone.

This shouldn’t be surprising: When looking at a challenging problem or question, the more perspectives that can be brought to bear, the better. According to Scott Page, author of
The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies
, we all get “stuck” when trying to answer tough questions, but “if we have people with diverse tools,
⁷¹
they’ll get stuck in different places.” As you look for potential collaborators, aim for people with backgrounds, cultural experiences, and skill sets that differ from your own: diversity fuels creativity.

Whereas in the past one might have been inclined to look for collaborators locally (as Andraka did, initially), today there’s no need to put geographical limits on your outreach. Now, for anyone looking to tackle big questions, “we all have two amazing things
⁷²
available to us,” said the film producer and part-time inventor Mick Ebeling. “We have a near-infinite resource of information at our fingertips—no other generation has had access to that. And we have this immediacy of human connection [through social networking and the Web in general]. You combine all of that information and that connection with people, and what we have is a global brain to tap into.”

Ebeling himself tapped into the “global brain” when he decided to take on an ambitious project, with the goal of helping a paralyzed artist continue to create his art. The story began when Ebeling visited an exhibition of artwork by Los Angeles artist Tony “TemptOne” Quan, a legend in the graffiti world. Though Quan had once been a prolific artist, he became afflicted with ALS (aka Lou Gehrig’s disease) and gradually lost use of his hands and legs, making it increasingly difficult to work. At first, Ebeling thought about writing a check to Quan and his family, but then, over a conversation with his wife at dinner, this question surfaced:
If Stephen Hawking can communicate through a machine, why don’t we have a way for an artist like Quan to draw again?

That Why question started Ebeling on a journey that eventually led him to a What If moment: When Ebeling learned about laser-tagging projection technology—which uses a laser and a pointer to write graffiti on the sides of buildings—he wondered if there might be an affordable way to enable someone to communicate and even create art by manipulating a laser through eye movements. Ebeling had no idea how this might be achieved, but now at least he had a good working question:
Knowing that laser technology can be used to create art, hands-free, what if we can figure out a way for Quan to control the laser with his eyes?

Ebeling had no expertise in any of the technology involved. He made his challenge even more ambitious by deciding that anything he developed would have to be extremely affordable—the idea was not to replicate a high-priced, Hawking-like personal communication system, but rather something much simpler and accessible even to a paralyzed person of limited financial means.

“I felt that the way to attack this was in a communal way,” Ebeling said. He approached Graffiti Research Lab, a company that specialized in laser-tagging technology, and asked if anyone there wanted to help him answer his question. He also searched among his own broad network of contacts for people with expertise in computer coding and engineering. “Today, we’re all hackers and makers,” Ebeling said; you have to find the right mix of people to bring together around a question that interests them all. After a year of planning and organization, Ebeling brought together in his house a team of seven international hackers and programmers for two and a half weeks of all-day programming sessions. By the end, they had cobbled together the Eyewriter.

The device was remarkably simple, at least on the surface: an inexpensive pair of sunglasses connected by wire to a small packet that incorporates ocular-recognition technology and lasers. The first true test of the system came when it was brought to Quan, who was in the hospital at the time. Ebeling’s crew set up outside the hospital a projector that was wirelessly linked to the Eyewriter they gave to Quan. That night, for the first time in six years, Quan was able to create graffiti—using eye movements to control the laser in his Eyewriter as he began to “draw” on a building wall outside the hospital.