Breakthroughs are often ushered in by surprises. And surprises take many forms. Sometimes you go seek them out, but other times, the surprises seem to do the seeking, at least to the person who’s aware of their tactics.

One of a surprise’s favorite tactics is to sneak up like a joke. Isaac Asimov once said, “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but,‘'Thats funny…” - (care of Mark Rober’s great TED talk, “How To Come Up With Good Ideas”)

How do we appreciate a surprise in the form of a good joke? Don’t dismiss anomalies, the data you’d otherwise exclude from the regression. “One must cultivate a chronic attention to things that do not totally fit, agree or makes sense.” (Robert Grudin, The Grace of Great Things)

Regular readers of this blog will appreciate another under-appreciated way of courting surprises: share your challenges with outsiders. We call such collaborators “Notice Novices” specifically because they are “much less likely to dismiss the apparent error as useless noise. Coming at the problem from a different perspective, with a few preconceived ideas about what the correct result is supposed to be, (allows) them to conceptualize scenarios where the mistake might actually be meaningful.”

“As the science writer Jonah Lehrer has observed, this pattern appears in one of the great scientific breakthroughs of 20th century physics, the discovery of cosmic background radiation, which was mistaken for meaningless static by the astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson for more than a year, until a chance conversation with a Princeton nuclear physicist planted the idea that the noise was not the result of faulty equipment... Two brilliant scientists with great technological acumen stumble across evidence of the universe is origin, evidence that would ultimately lead to a Nobel prize for both of them, and yet their first reaction is: Our telescope must be broken.”

(From one of my all-time favorites, Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From)

Related: the novice who designed the stealth bomber @ Skunk Works
Related: the novice who launched Beeple’s “Everydays” @ Christie’s

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