In Kevin Ashton’s new book, How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention, and Discovery, Ashton predicts the demise of the word “creativity.” It’s a relatively new word intended to describe the process of a genius’ insight, as described in these words created for Mozart’s mouth:

“When I am, as it were, completely myself, and of good cheer, my ideas flow best and most abundantly. My subject stands almost complete in my mind. When I write down my ideas everything is already finished; and it rarely differs from what was in my imagination.”

Ashton says Otto Jahn, a Mozart biographer, told us those words were fabricated back in 1856, but people still use them to illustrate “creativity” because, he says, they have little else to go on. Studies that claim to show the spontaneous insight they call creativity cannot be validated, and other studies demonstrate “ordinary thinking” leads to creative results for most, if not all, people.

This appears to follow the pattern Malcolm Gladwell describes in his book David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants. He describes how top-percentile students perform at Ivy League schools and second-tier schools. The key to lasting success after college appears to be excelling within your class, not the relative prestige of that class. Students in the top 10 percent of a second-tier university tend to outperform most students in the upper 20 percent of an Ivy League school (I’m pulling those stats off the top of my head, so I may be off a bit). You might think a large percentage of the Ivy League students would outperform all of the students in “lesser” schools, because of the supposed superiority of Ivy League education, but that doesn’t bear out in life.

The moral of the story, Ashton writes, is to see the truth in Newton’s famous statement, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,” by recognizing “he was standing on others’ shoulders by quoting George Herbert, who was quoting Robert Burton, who was quoting Diego de Estella, who was quoting John of Salisbury, who was quoting Bernard of Chartres.”

“There’s no such thing as a writer who yearns to be ignored. But writers thrive only in hushed vassalage to their own imaginations, shackled to their desks, trying to hear hints of that ancient inward thrum. When Montaigne proposes ‘an unimportant life without luster,’ you take his point. ‘A talent,’ said Goethe, ‘is formed in stillness.’ It’s called the limelight for a reason: Sooner or later you get limed by the light—burned, smeared, blinded.”

“There was a moment in Rome, writes H.J. Jackson in her new book, Those Who Write for Immortality: Romantic Reputations and the Dream of Lasting Fame, ‘when writers were elevated to a place among the immortals,’ and litterateurs have been dazzled by that elevation ever since.” (via Books, Inq.)

The Rabbit Room is having a sale on good books and music.