Every model,
A to Z.
25 models, about of reading. A new one lands every week.
Activation Energy
Twyla Tharp stepped out of her Manhattan apartment at 5:30 in the morning, wearing leg warmers, sweatshirts, and a hat.
Boden's Three Types of Creativity
On September 26, 1944, a Black woman walked into Decca Records’ New York studio with an electric guitar.
Cathedral Model
Chartres, 1194. A master mason stands in ash and charred stone.
Eisenhower Matrix
Charles Dickens sat at his desk in Devonshire Terrace on an October evening in 1843, reading sales figures for a novel that was bleeding readers.
Emergence
John Conway placed a black Go stone on a board in the mathematics common room at Cambridge.
First Principles Thinking
Wilbur Wright stood in a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, twisting a cardboard box.
Form-Function Attribution Bias
Doug Evans spent 1,200 days in San Francisco building a juicer.
Four Stages of Creativity
Henri Poincaré stepped onto an omnibus at Coutances in 1880.
G.I. Joe Fallacy
Samuel Taylor Coleridge knew exactly what was killing him.
Gestalt Principles
Henri Matisse spent his final decade confined to a wheelchair, scissors in hand, cutting colored paper.
Infinite Game
Paul Cézanne was sixty-seven when a thunderstorm caught him painting Mont Sainte-Victoire.
Inversion
Christopher Nolan wrote Memento as a linear story first.
Luck Surface Area
Jean-Michel Basquiat had just killed his graffiti persona.
MAYA Principle
Raymond Loewy sat in a NASA conference room in Washington on October 14, 1969, and listened to an engineer explain why the astronauts would never look out a window. He
Mere Exposure Effect
On February 14, 1887, forty-seven of France’s most celebrated artists published a letter of protest on the front page of Le Temps.
Novelty Search
In October 1959, Brion Gysin pressed a Stanley blade through mount board in his room at the Beat Hotel in Paris.
Peak-End Rule
On May 7, 1824, Caroline Unger turned a deaf man around.
Predator-Prey Dynamics
Umberto D’Ancona spread Adriatic Sea catch records across his desk at the University of Rome.
Redundancy
Oren Jacob watched the files vanish. He stood in Larry Cutler’s office at Pixar’s Richmond, California campus in 1998, staring at a directory for the character Woody on his screen.
Satisficing
Isaac Asimov sat at his electric typewriter by seven-thirty each morning, a backup machine in the closet for the day the first one died.
Second-Order Thinking
“A runt will not play Michael.”
Semmelweis Reflex
In September 2004, Anne Rice logged onto Amazon and read the reviews of her latest novel, Blood Canticle.
Stocks and Flows
In March 1836, Chapman and Hall printed one thousand copies of the first installment of The Pickwick Papers.
Survivorship Bias
In 1943, American bombers were getting shredded over Germany.
The Hammer and the Nail
Alfred Hitchcock set Robert Bloch’s Psycho on a Paramount executive’s desk in the summer of 1959.