How Innovation Really Happens

In Japanese martial arts, Shuhari describes the stages of learning and mastery. From Wikipedia:

• shu (守) “protect”, “obey” — traditional wisdom — learning fundamentals, techniques, heuristics, proverbs
• ha (破) “detach”, “digress” — breaking with tradition — detachment from the illusions of self
• ri (離) “leave”, “separate” — transcendence — there are no techniques or proverbs, all moves are natural, becoming one with spirit alone without clinging to forms; transcending the physical

That’s honestly how you pretty much learn everything. For example, let’s say you wanted to learn to be an amazing swimmer.

First, copy the techniques of the master. Copy Michael Phelps’ stroke. Copy his training schedule. Copy his diet. Copy pretty much everything. If you did that for a while, you might not win a bunch of golds in the Olympics, but you’d be pretty darn good.

Eventually, you’ll get bored of just copying the masters. Copying will be too easy. You’ll start to see that there are things that Michael Phelps does that are ideally suited to his body type. There might be something that works better for you. You’ll eventually start doing small optimizations, experiments, and incrementally improving.

Finally (and this is actually pretty rare), you can transcend. In swimming, David Armbruster had a transcending experience in 1934. He saw a problem in the breaststroke — there’s a huge amount of drag when you try to get your arms in front of you again. So, he came up with a way to to get your arms in front of you again by going over the water. He called this new style the “butterfly”. It was substantially faster than the traditional breaststroke and by 1938, almost every breaststroke swimmer was using the new style.

The key point is that you have to go through all the stages. You can’t just skip to transcendence. People try to do that too often (with disastrous results).