Da Doo Ron Ron and Albert Einstein: Part Two

In my previous article, I described the role of the skills of connecting and creating in successfully carrying out any kind of endeavor – whether on the improv stage or on life’s stage. To sum up, “connecting” identifies the range of promising possibilities to pursue, while “creating” determines which of those possibilities are the most promising – and pursues them.

I was inspired to make this “connection” by a passage in John M. Barry’s superb book, The Great Influenza, a panoramic account of the men and women of medicine who grappled with the 1918-19 influenza pandemic. Barry challenges one of our most-cherished dichotomies – art vs. science – by observing:

“The greatest challenge of science, its art, lies in asking an important question and framing it in a way that allows it to be broken into manageable pieces, into experiments that can be conducted that ultimately lead to answers. To do this requires a certain kind of genius, one that probes vertically and sees horizontally.

“Horizontal vision allows someone to assimilate and weave together seemingly unconnected bits of information. It allows an investigator to see what others do not see, and to make leaps of connectivity and creativity. Probing vertically, going deeper and deeper into something, creates new information….”

Seeing horizontally and probing vertically … shades of the contrast between Da Doo Ron Ron and The Harold!

Barry goes on to note that many researchers were (and are) skilled at finding connections, a la the Da Doo Ron Ron player who can quickly flip through the Rolodex of the mind to find a rhyme, any rhyme. However, Barry says, the greatest researchers were (and are) able to do more than just stand back and regard such connections as “interesting.” Like the best Harold players, they can probe and develop those connections and mold them into a work of art – whether a new vaccine or a complex improvised story.

In fact, Barry relates his horizontal-vertical observation to perhaps the greatest artist in all of science, Albert Einstein:

“Einstein reportedly once said that his own major scientific talent was his ability to look at an enormous number of experiments and journal articles, select the very few that were both correct and important, ignore the rest, and build a theory on the right ones….. [P]art of his genius was an instinct for what mattered and the ability to pursue it vertically and connect it horizontally.”

Scanning the enormous possibilities … selecting a few, ignoring the rest ... connecting and pursuing … somehow I think Albert would have made a heck of a Harold player.

But wait! Yes, a performance improviser needs to both connect and create – but what of the Daily Improviser? If we’re expecting her to be similarly well rounded, and if we regard her as somewhat deficient if she displays the rough edges of weakness, aren’t we contradicting the observations elsewhere in this blog about focusing your development on your strengths?

Well, to resolve this, we can look at the life and career of a man of science who was lacking in a critical skillset - yet who became (in Barry’s words) “the single most powerful individual in the history of American medicine.”

[To be continued ...]