Why imagination is more important than knowledge

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My favoured American writer H. Mencken even suggests that imagination is the bane of humanity, leading us down blind alley ways and in circles. I started to consider the merit of Einstein's statement anew, more than a decade ago, over coffee with the former federal government scientist turned rock musician Paul Hoffert. Hoffert, a physicist, quit his job at the National Research Council NRC in to help found Lighthouse, one of the most successful Canadian rock bands ever and an icon of music innovation.

Hoffert later amplified this success with an award-winning solo career in jazz, classical, and electronic music as well as work as a university researcher and pioneer in information technology. He has credibility when musing on the nature of creativity, the subject of our conversation that day in the NRC cafeteria.

I listened. His view of imagination as the instrument that drives and shapes innovation was not inconsistent with what others were saying about the creative process in workshops, symposia, and conferences that my colleagues and I were staging at the time. In different ways and words, most participants described it as the function of three forces:. Knowledge and technical skill are the tools that turn an idea into reality, and emotional strength earns mention because many great achievers endure discouragement and disparagement on the route to creative success.

Though Hoffert's comments dovetailed easily with this view, they also seemed a little mechanical to me: more about the machinery of creativity and innovation, a subset rather than the whole. Setting a goal and building a path up to the summit. Not the ardor needed to climb it. Consequently, I didn't fully embrace the concept - imagination as the most important thing - until I associated it, slowly over time, with advocacy for imagination in other quarters.

Imagining is the chosen tool of motivational gurus, psychoanalysts, and other emotional health practitioners, and most of us easily accept that visualizing a tranquil setting can calm and imagining a worst case can disturb.

This exercise, combined with the rock-musician scientist's advice, implied that a robust and managed imagination could be - that more important thing - as the kingpin in that creativity triumvirate whether resident in an individual or a collaboration. Over a half century ago, Northrup Frye, our celebrated literary critic, touched many Canadians with his CBC Massey Lectures and book The Educated Imagination, an eloquent and sometimes funny argument for the merits of studying and enjoying great literature.

Frye noted that we live much, if not the preponderance of our lives, in the imaginary world, projecting the future, reflecting on the past, and trying to deduce the true nature of the present.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wisely said, "The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be. The certainty of purpose has been described as the greatest principle of all in the formula of success, being the force of psychological charge and the focus of direction of all action for the big achievers and leaders of this life.

Taught by Aristotle to Alexander the Great, held in the minds of Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford, and singled out by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, focus and determination are the qualities possessed by big winners. When Bill Gates and Warren Buffett first met, Gate's mother — who was on dinner-hosting duties - asked everyone around that table to identify the single most important factor accredited for their success through life.

Gates and Buffett gave the same one-word answer: "Focus. In this world, there are those that follow the general paradigm, and there are the ones that diverge with passion.

These are the ones that break away from norms and can climb the highest mountains of achievement against what life might rationally have had in store for them.

Desire and determination combine to a substance that reigns above all. Plato said on the importance of desire that it "must drive the soul with a reigned-in craziness.

Once upon a time an English teacher residing in Hangzhou was introduced to the internet by a friend. His first reaction was to search for beer in the Chinese market, discovering that there was nothing relevant online. He is not a technologist, neither is he a coder - he even struggled to pass university exams. He described himself as "a terrific fighter since a young age, with no fear for opponents bigger than him," with a mantra of "never, never give up".

Ma has declared that he could be a general if he were born in a period of war. When Alibaba was battling eBay in China, reporters called him 'Crazy Jack' because of his animated manner of expression and boldness. His energy levels are endless and his methods far from conventional. And, finally there are the dreamers and visionaries of this world. What better way to describe the power of having a dream than by giving the final word to Richard Branson.