Mules Rule

“They say that I'm stubborn, and my wife says that, too, but it's paid off so far.”

Sugar Ray Leonard

The Mules Rule rule of creativity has nothing to do with being an ass. 

Creative people can or cannot be asses just like anyone else.  The rule here is about being stubborn as a mule since innovation, in part, is about a kind of mulish brilliance, a slog through the mire that can often be mistaken for plodding.
 Maybe a daintier way of saying this is that stubbornness is next to goodliness.

Successful authors know all about this but it is hidden from view because we only tend to hear about the outcomes.  For example, Lord of the Flies by William Golding was rejected 20 times before it was published.  Yet Golding ruled like a mule and never gave up.  Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell was rejected 38 times and Carrie by Stephen King 30 times.  You have to ask yourself…what made them try it the second time, let alone the 30th time?  Egomania perhaps or compulsion.  Or just plain mulish rule.

Thomas Alva Edison’s famous quote is that invention is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.  He would know with his 1093 patents.  But even Edison said that his greatest invention was not the phonograph or the movie projector but his own laboratory, the working environment he designed.  This was the place were he and his staff plugged away at problems day after day.  It was an invention factory, a stable of mules working, chipping away at solutions. 

Like the light bulb, for example.

Edison knew that electricity could cause a filament in a vacuum to glow and not burn out.  That would be a nice basis for a steady light and the search was on for the best material to use.  Edison was practical so he did not chemically evaluate potential materials or look at atomic structures.  Instead he and his staff stubbornly tested over a thousand materials – one by one – for months until he hit on one that worked.  It turned out to be a piece of carbonized thread.

The Edison lab never developed a theory about how materials burn, never got a grand understanding of how or why.  But in the end, after being stubborn about it, they had a light bulb.

Tycho Brahe was another smart mule.

A Dutch astronomer in the 16^th century, Brahe is best known nowadays for his nose famously bitten off in a barroom brawl.  He wore a bronze replacement and that alone should earn our respect.  But Brahe was not only metal-nosed, he was also pig-headed.  He spent his entire life carefully and meticulously measuring the location of the planets.  Night after night he climbed to his telescope and wrote down numbers.  He could barely have known what use they would be except for a general insight that measurement itself – systematic notation – would be handy in the new science that was emerging.

Brahe did nothing with his findings during his lifetime.  But 40 years after his death, Johannes Kepler studied the notations and measurements and used them to establish the elliptical orbits of the planets.  Brahe's measurements and Kepler's use of them led to the revolution about planetary movement that was crystallized by Copernicus.

Brahe’s work created a foundation – the measurements, the data – that became the basis for the breakthrough.  Creativity, after all, is rarely the individual work of isolated talents but instead a social event involving collaboration, duplication, refutation, reinvention, and cross-pollination.  Brahe was muling as he chipped away at his little section of it.

That is how stubbornness – which is not always such a pretty talent – gets tossed into our Ingenarium along with our other ingredients.  It is the skill that forces us to push on, to pay attention to the details, and to not give up.  No small contribution.

So be a mule and get things done; whether you are also an ass is completely up to you.