刘协皮肤:怎样像乔布斯一样思考

    像史蒂夫·乔布斯和沃尔特·迪斯尼这样的人，他们和其他人有什么不一样的地方呢？你能成为他们中的一个么？埃瑞克·卡勒尼斯(Eric Calonius)在他即将到来的新书《向前十步走》中提出了这些问题。在下面节选的内容中，卡勒尼斯描述了那些梦幻般的想法是如何产生的。

The visionary is a pattern hunter. And as the patterns begin to take shape, the visionary paces the hall anxiously, staring out the window. The cognitive dissonance builds between what is and what will be. The visionary's sense of discomfort grows.

    灵感的产生需要遵循一定的模式。形成固定的模式之后，灵感就会急不可待的走到门口，呼之欲出。对现实与未来的认知存在着矛盾，这是困扰灵感的因素。

    当思考者精疲力竭到了一定程度，不再纠结于眼前的困难时，大脑会进入一种单一意识的状态。匈牙利心理学家米哈伊·齐克森米哈伊（Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi）将这种状态定义为一个著名的概念：心流。我们消耗生命中大部分的时光思考过去和将来，心流却把我们带入那个狭小的时间区段，“现在”——我们的大脑不常处于这种状态。 

MRIs show that, in the state of flow, the brain is quieting down. The flickering of activity recedes into weak flashes of color. The thinker, at this point, is probably aware of nothing at all. Whether it is intuition, or visualization, or the dawning of an awakening that draws the visionary near, at last the time of inspiration arrives. This is the famous Eureka! moment.

    磁共振成像显示，在心流状态下，大脑变得平静，反射区的成像颜色变淡。在这个时候，思考者可能对任何事情都没有清楚的意识。也许是直觉，也许是幻觉，也许是一种如梦初醒的感觉，灵感被拉近了，最后终于降临。这就是著名的“Eureka! moment”。（译者注：意为“发现时刻”。据传，阿基米德在洗澡时发现浮力原理，高兴得来不及穿上裤子，跑到街上大喊：“Eureka！”（“我找到了！”））

Steve Jobs "stood back": "You can't really predict what will happen," he said. "But you can feel the direction you're going. And that's about as close as you can get. Then you just stand back and get out of the way, and these things take on a life of their own."

    史蒂夫·乔布斯“转过身”：“你无法预测究竟会发生什么，但你能感觉到自己前进的方向。你就只知道那么多。然后你就得退到一边，事情会自己演变下去。”

John Lennon just took a nap: "I'd spent five hours that morning trying to write a song that was meaningful and good. I was just sitting, trying to think, and I thought of myself sitting there doing nothing and going nowhere. Once I'd thought of that, it was easy; it all came out. No, I remember now, I'd actually stopped trying to think of something. Nothing would come. I was cheesed off and went for a lie down, having given up. Then I thought of myself as nowhere man, sitting in this nowhere land. 'Nowhere Man' came, words and music, the whole damn thing. The same with 'In My Life.' I'd struggled for days and hours, trying to write clever lyrics. Then I gave up, and 'In My Life' came to me. Letting it go is the whole game."

    约翰·列侬刚打了个盹儿：“那天上午我花了5个小时要写一首有意义的好歌。我就那么坐着，努力的想，然后我觉得自己坐在那儿什么也没干，什么也没想。当我那么觉着的时候，简简单单，一下子就写出来了。不对，我刚想起来，其实我停下来过。什么都想不出来，我泄气了，不干了，躺到床上。然后我觉得自己成了个方外之人，正坐在这方外之地。‘方外之人’来啦，歌词和音乐，所有他妈的一切。就是那首‘In My Life’。我为了写点好词儿，耗了那么多功夫。然后我放弃了，‘In my life’就出来了。诀窍就是别较劲儿。”

Einstein closed his eyes and let his fingers wander over the piano keys. Then he jumped up. "There, now I've got it!" his sister Maja remembers him exclaiming as he hurried off into his study.

    爱因斯坦闭上眼睛，手指逡巡在钢琴键上。然后他跳起来：“那儿，现在我明白了！”他的妹妹玛雅(Maja)回忆他就这么大喊着，急急忙忙的投入研究中去。

That moment when the new pattern snaps into place has been described many ways: like scales falling from the eyes, like a flash of lightning, like molecules of water bouncing randomly around and, upon reaching a freezing temperature, snapping instantly into rigid lines. Something new comes across your consciousness. It "dawns" on you. Says physicist Carlo Rubbia, "It's an irrational and an instinctive moment in which something clicks in your mind and you say, 'Why don't we do this -- I mean, why not?'"

    有很多方式描述新模式突然成形的那一刻：比如眼前一亮，比如灵光闪现，比如乍迸的水浆瞬间冰冻成凝固的线条。一种新的东西划过你的意识，它“唤醒”了你。物理学家卡罗·鲁比亚(Carlo Rubbia)说：“那是一种非理性的、本能的时刻，有什么东西在你的意识里“咔嗒”一下，然后你说：‘我们为什么不这么做呢——我的意思是，怎么就不行？’”

The snapping of fingers perfectly describes the moment of inspiration (and makes you wonder if the opposable thumb was actually made for this purpose). For it is two opposing forces -- what is and what should be -- that are being resolved.

    手指捻出的脆响完美诠释了灵感到来的时刻（让你怀疑大拇指的力气就是干这个用的）。因为需要解决的是两股相互对抗的力量——现在和将来。

It is surprising how something as portentous as an epiphany resembles the punch line of a joke: "Does your dog bite?" Inspector Clouseau of The Pink Panther fame asks the hotel clerk as he sees a dog at his feet. "No," the clerk responds. Clouseau bends over to pet the dog and has his sleeve ripped off. "I thought you said your dog doesn't bite!" he remarks angrily. Replies the clerk, "That's not my dog."

     象“epiphany”这种不详的词语也能用来形容笑话中的妙语，这真是让人惊奇。（译者注：epiphany兼有 “基督降临”（意味着世界末日）和“顿悟”两种含义。）“你的狗咬人么？”《粉红豹》(The Pink Panther)中的著名人物克鲁索侦探(Inspector Clouseau)看到脚边有一只狗，于是问宾馆的工作人员。“不咬人。”那人回答说。于是克鲁索弯下腰去拍那只狗，结果被撕掉了袖子。“不是说你的狗不咬人吗！”他生气的质问。那人回答道：“这不是我的狗。”

We laugh at such jokes because the pattern change is unexpected. It comes out of the blue. "The punch line," according to Horace Judson, former professor of the history of science at Johns Hopkins University, "tells us that a set of things that we thought belonged to one pattern was really, all along, making another pattern."

    我们被这样的笑话逗笑，是因为模式的变化超出预期。它突如其来。根据约翰·霍普金斯大学(Johns Hopkins University)前任科学史教授霍勒斯·贾德森(Horace Judson)的说法：“妙语，就是把一种模式下理所当然的事情一下子转换到另一种模式中去。”

Incredible as it seems, the brain's search for a resolution to dissonance is exactly what you might hear in a comedy club: When the U.S. Postal Service can't deliver the mail overnight, we get... (laughter growing) FedEx ! When the Internet has billions of pages of text that are impossible to search, we get (chortles and applause) Google ! When we can't get a good cup of brewed coffee, we get (drum roll and rim shot) Starbucks!

    看起来不可思议的是，为了解决矛盾的状况，大脑所遵循的方式和笑话俱乐部里能听到的一模一样：“当美国邮政不能在第二天把邮件送到的时候，我们有（大家开始笑）…联邦快递！当互联网上几十亿的网页搜不过来的时候，我们有（大笑和掌声）谷歌！当我们煮不好咖啡的时候，我们有（密集的锣鼓声）星巴克！”

The counterintuitive thought in all of this is that for an idea to really be radical, it has to be in some way ridiculous. "First of all you have to take it as a joke," explains Carlo Rubbia. "Any fundamental advances in our field are made by looking at it with the smile of a child who plays a game."

    所有这些都体现了一种与直觉相反的思路，即：一种真正突破性的想法，它在某种意义上一定是荒谬的。“首先，你必须把它当成一个笑话。”卡罗·鲁比亚解释说，“在我们的领域中，一切根本性进展都是‘玩儿’出来的，要带着小孩子做游戏时的笑容去看它。”

Science writer Isaac Asimov said, "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not Eureka! (I found it!) but, 'That's funny...'" That phenomenon was also noticed by Lewis Thomas, the former dean of medicine at Yale and president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute. "It seems to me that whenever I have been around a laboratory at a time when something very interesting has happened, it has at first seemed to be quite funny," he recalled. "There's laughter connected with the surprise -- it does look funny. And whenever you hear laughter and somebody saying, 'But that's preposterous!' -- you can tell that things are going well and that something probably worth looking at has begun to happen in the lab."

    科普作家艾萨克·阿西莫夫(Isaac Asimov)说：“科学中最让人兴奋的词儿不是Eureka!，而是‘好玩儿’。它几乎预示了所有的发现。”耶鲁大学前医学系主任、斯隆·凯特林记忆研究所(Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute)所长莱维斯·汤姆斯也发现了这一现象。“在实验室那里，好像每当有让我感兴趣的事情发生，刚开始一定都看起来很有意思，”他回忆说，“笑声和惊叹声连在一起——这的确搞笑。每当你听到大笑声，然后有人说:‘可这没道理阿！’——你就可以确定进展很顺利，实验室里出现了值得一看的东西。

Indeed, this is the secret of visionary ideas: Most earthshaking ideas look funny at first. They are not sensible. Think of the jokes that have been pulled: Jobs introducing the iMac -- without a floppy disk! Branson, with no experience in it, starting an international airline. Disney (DIS, Fortune 500), at the depth of the Great Depression, proposing a full-length feature cartoon. "You have to have confidence in nonsense," says airplane designer Burt Rutan, whose aircraft have circled the globe on a single tank of gas, and have climbed to the edge of space as well.

    的确，这就是灵思妙想的秘密：大部分惊天动地的想法开始时都看起来很有意思。它们不合情理。想想那些曾经的笑柄吧：乔布斯让我们知道iMAC——没软驱！布兰森（译者注：指Richard Branson，商界传奇人物），对航空业一窍不通，却设立了一家国际航空公司。迪斯尼，在大萧条的衰落中推出了全本故事卡通。“你必须对胡闹有信心。”飞机设计师伯特·鲁坦(Burt Rutan)说道。——他的飞机只用一箱油就绕地球飞了一圈，还曾飞到大气层的边缘。

"We build toys," said Nassim Taleb. "Some of those toys change the world."

    “我们制造玩具。”纳西姆·塔勒布(Nassim Taleb)说，“其中一些玩具改变世界。”

And now comes the hardest part of the visionary's quest: selling those silly ideas to a skeptical world.

    现在是思想者问题中最难的部分：把那些冒傻气的点子兜售给一个多疑的世界。

Excerpted from Ten Steps Ahead by Erik Calonius by arrangement with Portfolio Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc., Copyright ? 2011 by Erik Calonius.

    节选自《向前十步走》，作者埃瑞克·卡勒尼斯，由企鹅集团成员之一企鹅文件夹约稿。埃瑞克·卡勒尼斯版权所有? 2011。