Cultivating Creativity: What Musk and Franklin Knew

Creativity doesn’t just require risk-taking or industry, it requires a foundation for innovation.

What is creativity? Both Elon Musk and Benjamin Franklin can give us clues.

In 2002, Musk was on a mission to start a company—SpaceX—that would develop the technology needed to get people to Mars. Musk ran into a problem, though: Rocket manufacturers were quoting him rocket prices up to $65 million a pop. This was far too expensive for his budget. To solve this problem, Musk researched what a rocket was made of and how much those raw materials cost. He learned that the raw materials of a rocket comprised only 2% of its total cost.¹ This discovery, along with Musk’s realization that he could cut launch costs greatly by making reusable rockets, made SpaceX possible and profitable.²

Nearly three hundred years earlier, in 1747, Benjamin Franklin was working on a project of his own involving lightning. For years prior, Franklin had played with Leyden jars, which were old-timey capacitors (devices similar to batteries except that they discharge electricity immediately or shortly after being powered). Franklin used these jars to temporarily power various gadgets to entertain guests, and during his experiments, he intentionally shocked himself with them to better understand the properties of static electricity. Little did he know that he was on the cusp of making one of the most important scientific discoveries of his time: Lightning is electricity. Franklin noticed one day that the “blue tendrils” his Leyden jars gave off looked and behaved a lot like lightning. He formed a hypothesis and then experimented. He flew a silk kite in a thunderstorm with a metal key tied to the end, near his hands. Lightning struck the kite, causing electricity to travel through its wet string and shock Franklin’s knuckle. Franklin realized that it felt just like being shocked by a Leyden jar. This, and further experimentation, confirmed that lightning was the same phenomenon as the blue tendrils of the Leyden jars. Franklin, a very practical and business-oriented man, went on to invent the first copper lightning rod, saving countless lives and buildings from lightning strikes—a hazard that had plagued many prior generations.³ We still use lightning rods and the principle of grounding to protect buildings today.

As the stories of Musk and Franklin indicate, creativity spans all of human history. Creativity is, in part, the timeless human capacity to make new things by identifying and integrating principles from reality. Regardless of your time and place, you, too, can tap into and cultivate creativity so you can achieve great things. But what did Musk and Franklin know that enabled them to be so creative?

What Creativity Requires: The Changeable and the Unchangeable

What if Musk hadn’t questioned conventional ways of getting rockets? If Musk had thought that the status quo was sufficient, he would have never started SpaceX and built his reusable rockets. Likewise, what if Franklin hadn’t questioned the then-popular idea that lightning was simply “God’s will?” If he had accepted that idea, then, out of deference to “the guy in the sky,” he wouldn’t have conducted his experiments.

Musk and Franklin both knew that creativity requires identifying what we can change. Before Musk could obtain rockets more affordably, he had to first consciously identify the fact that there were alternatives to the ways things were already being done. Franklin knew he couldn’t change the laws of nature, but he also knew that, if he better understood those laws, he could use them to his advantage. Both men acted on this recognition that they could change certain things.

The opposite mindset, and an opposite result, can be seen in early alchemists who assumed that they could turn base metals like lead into gold through chemical processes and thereby become extremely rich. A similar error is occurring today when it comes to many digital cryptocurrencies or non-fungible tokens (NFTs).⁴ A non-fungible token is a piece of digital content (often art) that is verified as authentic by complex software called a blockchain. You can think of a blockchain as a digital art appraiser. Between 2021 and 2023, many people got involved in producing, selling, and buying NFTs. Overly optimistic speculators bought NFTs thinking they’d be able to quickly resell them for a huge profit. However, many purchased them during high demand, and when demand cooled, the resale value of most NFTs plummeted, leaving many (if not most) speculators with less money than they’d started with.⁵ These speculators acted as though they could bypass the laws of supply and demand and become rich in the process. Some did become rich—at least in a superficial, monetary sense—but the fact still stands: None of these speculators created anything of real, life-enhancing value.

There are many other ways in which people think they can change the unchangeable. Many people today believe in a so-called “law of attraction”—in this case, the idea that if you simply desire something hard enough—Ferraris, hot girlfriends, mansions—you’ll “attract” it somehow. This is sheer lunacy.

Real creativity requires knowing the difference between what you can and cannot change.

If we fail to distinguish between what we can and cannot change, we’ll fail to be creative. We’ll attempt to do silly things like turning lead into gold, or easily replicable 1s and 0s into millions of dollars, or our thoughts into good-looking women. We’ll either fail to see what is possible to us or we’ll waste our time trying to achieve the impossible.

How to Better Distinguish Between the Changeable and the Unchangeable

Recognizing what we can and cannot change is a vital part of increasing our creativity, but how do we do this? How do we better differentiate the changeable and the unchangeable? There are numerous ways; let’s briefly explore a few of them.

Study and Practice

One way is to study and practice. For example, when I first got a sales job, I studied a lot. I learned about the purpose of sales, how to use sales software, how to persuade leads, and so on. Eventually, when I knew enough to get started, I put my knowledge to work in practice. I had to learn to quickly determine which of two categories leads fell into: people who were unchangeably unwilling to buy and those who might be willing to buy. I could work with the latter; in some cases, I could overcome their initial objections and change a lead into a customer.

Another form of study is thoughtfully playing with new technologies. I’ve been exploring ChatGPT for a while now and have found its coding capabilities useful. At my organization, a big part of my job is publishing and promoting articles and YouTube videos. Recently, I had an idea: What if every video I embed could automatically pause at the thirty-second mark, display a “continue watching” button, and resume from there when users clicked the button to go to the full video on a different page? The purpose of this would be to increase the likelihood that users would like and comment on the original video, and hopefully subscribe to the channel as well. The problem was that I barely knew how to code. But I did know that ChatGPT “knew”. So, I described my goal to it and worked with it to produce custom code. It took about two hours to finish. If I hadn’t had ChatGPT, the task probably would have taken me five or ten times as long. Playing with technology can help expand your understanding of what’s changeable.

Whether you’re selling products or experimenting with AI, study and practice help you identify a lot of things you can change. And during the process of discovering what you can change, you almost inevitably discover what you can’t. In sales, I learned an unchangeable fact: If you don’t call the right people, you won’t sell as many (if any) products. AI, likewise, is subject to unchangeable facts. For instance, the usefulness of ChatGPT’s responses is limited by the quality of your prompts and of its datasets.

Challenging Premises

Understanding what we can and cannot change also requires challenging certain premises. Musk challenged the prices rocket sellers were quoting him. He gave himself time to think independently about the problem and consequently challenged the idea that rocket prices necessarily had to correspond to what certain people said they were. Likewise, Franklin challenged the long-unquestioned Puritan premise that lightning was God’s wrath. Franklin demonstrated through his experiments and inventions that electricity is not supernatural; it simply finds the shortest path to ground. In his day, church steeples in the middle of nowhere tended to be the tallest things in the area, making them a prime target for “God’s wrath.”

Challenging premises is often a useful way to discover that things regarded as unchangeable by others actually can be changed. However, some facts simply can’t be changed, and creativity requires acceptance in these cases. In ancient Greece, the Skeptics were a group of thinkers known for questioning the truth of everything.⁶ One of their core arguments was that objectivity was impossible because our senses can deceive us and therefore can never be trusted. In other words, they were challenging the premise that our physical senses perceive reality accurately. This argument, however, is self-refuting. To borrow a term from Aristotle, this is an example of reaffirmation through denial. This complicated-sounding phrase is actually quite simple. The Skeptics denied the premise “the five senses are valid” and in doing so they reaffirmed its truth because, in order to deny the senses, you must depend on them to begin with. (Try to imagine a way in which one might deny the validity of the senses without using information collected by the senses.) If we want to cultivate creativity, we must not waste time trying to change facts that can’t be changed. Instead, we must simply accept them and then search for other relevant facts that we can change.

Intellectual Honesty

Cultivating an understanding of what we can and cannot change also requires intellectual honesty. It’s possible (and sometimes understandable) to dismiss or ignore facts that we know to be true and relevant to the issue at hand. However, creativity requires that we be honest with ourselves about what we know, what we don’t know, and what we aren’t sure about.

For example, I once worked in sales and made good money. I enjoyed it, but I knew that I had a greater desire to write about ideas I cared about and to (hopefully) make money doing that. I initially ignored this desire because I thought I could trick myself into liking a well-paying sales career more than an OK-paying writing career. But the more I ignored this unfulfilled desire, the less happy I became in my sales position. Eventually, I decided to be honest with myself about my desire and to put my mind to the task of finding a way to make money while learning to write. This led me to pick up a part-time career advisor job at Discover Praxis and to join a paid writing fellowship with the Foundation for Economic Education. Being honest about my desires and my situation enabled me to find a creative solution to retaining positive income while learning how to write better.

Living Consciously

Understanding what we can and cannot change also requires what psychologist Nathaniel Branden calls “living consciously.” Branden wrote:

Living consciously is a state of being mentally active rather than passive. It is the ability to look at the world through fresh eyes. It is intelligence taking joy in its own function. Living consciously is seeking to be aware of everything that bears on our interests, actions, values, purposes, and goals. It is the willingness to confront facts, pleasant or unpleasant. It is the desire to discover our mistakes and correct them. Within the range of our interests and concerns, it is the quest to keep expanding our awareness and understanding, both of the world external to self and of the world within. It is respect for reality and respect for the distinction between the real and the unreal. It is the commitment to see what we see and know what we know.⁷

Living consciously, in my experience, is a hard but very rewarding habit. Once upon a time, I wasn’t as physically flexible as I wanted to be, and it was affecting my performance at the gym (and consequently my happiness). Instead of pushing this fact out of my mind, I decided to take action to correct it and signed up to join a yoga studio. After about a month of consistent yoga, I was able to touch my toes easily for the first time in a long time, and since then, yoga has helped me better prevent injuries while weight lifting at the gym.

Failing to live consciously results in failing to recognize what we can and cannot change. When we fail to make that distinction, our creativity suffers—as do our lives more broadly.

A Foundation for Innovation

Ultimately, recognizing what we can and cannot change requires rationality. Rationality is the virtue of fully and consistently using your reason to make decisions and to solve problems. It involves active study and practice, challenging premises, honesty about your knowledge, conscious living, and more. In other words, rationality requires keeping your mind consistently connected to reality so that, among other things, you can draw clear and accurate distinctions between what you can and cannot change.

Without rationality, seeing this distinction is impossible. Without rationality, Musk couldn’t have seen a way to make rockets cheaper, and Franklin couldn’t have seen that static electricity and lightning are the same phenomenon. (And the same is true of countless other scientists, creators, and entrepreneurs.)

If we want to unlock greater creativity, we must use reason to learn and respect the difference between things we can change and things we can’t.⁸ This habit forms an important part of the foundation of innovation. By cultivating this fertile, solid ground, your creativity will grow—and so will you.

1. Material costs aren’t the only cost involved in manufacturing rockets. Paying engineers, building assembly lines, getting government licensure, and so on are also necessary or unavoidable parts of the process.

2. I got this story about Elon Musk from this article by James Clear.

3. Franklin is a super interesting and important historical figure. I got this story about him from Walter Isaacson’s biography on him, Benjamin Franklin, which I highly recommend reading or listening to.

4. This isn’t to say there isn’t any value in cryptocurrencies or NFTs. The blockchain technology space is very promising, but, as with many new technologies that could make people millions or billions of dollars, there are usually more charlatans trying to make a quick buck by overpromising and under delivering than there are good-natured entrepreneurs truly trying to create long-term value.

5. This article from VICE recounts people who lost anywhere from a few thousand to over a million dollars in the 2022-2023 NFT bubble.

6. The philosophic school of Skepticism (capital “S”) should not be confused with lowercase “s” skepticism, which can be rational.

7. The Art of Living Consciously, page 11

8. I first got the idea for writing this essay when reading Ayn Rand’s essay “The Metaphysical Versus the Man-made” in the Signet edition of Philosophy: Who Needs It. The metaphysical is the unchangeable and the man-made is the changeable. I highly recommend reading this if you want a deeper knowledge of the importance of understanding the difference between these two.