Myth
A common myth predicts that most if not all innovation occur through epiphanies. Not all innovations occur through epiphanies; Scott Berkun notes that "the most useful way to think of an epiphany is as an occasional bonus of working on tough problems". Most innovations occur without epiphany, and epiphanies often contribute little towards finding the next one. Crucially, epiphany cannot be predicted, or controlled.
Although epiphanies are only a rare occurrence, crowning a process of significant labor, there is a common myth that epiphanies of sudden comprehension are commonly responsible for leaps in technology and the sciences. Famous epiphanies include Archimedes' realization of how to estimate the volume of a given mass, which inspired him to shout "Eureka!" ("I have found it!"). The biographies of many mathematicians and scientists include an epiphanic episode early in the career, the ramifications of which were worked out in detail over the following years. For example, allegedly Albert Einstein was struck as a young child by being given a compass, and realizing that some unseen force in space was making it move. A similar flash of holistic understanding in a prepared mind was said to give Charles Darwin his "hunch" (about natural selection) during The Voyage of the Beagle. Another famous epiphany myth is associated with Isaac Newton's apple story. Though such epiphanies might have occurred, they were almost certainly the result of long and intensive periods of study those individuals have undertaken, not a sudden, out-of-the-blue, flash of inspiration on an issue they have not thought about previously.
Epiphanies can be distinguished by a (usually spiritual) vision, as epiphanies are often triggered by irrelevant incidents or objects.
Read more about this topic: Epiphany (feeling)
Famous quotes containing the word myth:
“... if, as women, we accept a philosophy of history that asserts that women are by definition assimilated into the male universal, that we can understand our past through a male lens—if we are unaware that women even have a history—we live our lives similarly unanchored, drifting in response to a veering wind of myth and bias.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“One of the oddest features of western Christianized culture is its ready acceptance of the myth of the stable family and the happy marriage. We have been taught to accept the myth not as an heroic ideal, something good, brave, and nearly impossible to fulfil, but as the very fibre of normal life. Given most families and most marriages, the belief seems admirable but foolhardy.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)
“That, of course, was the thing about the fifties with all their patina of familial bliss: A lot of the memories were not happy, not mine, not my friends’. That’s probably why the myth so endures, because of the dissonance in our lives between what actually went on at home and what went on up there on those TV screens where we were allegedly seeing ourselves reflected back.”
—Anne Taylor Fleming (20th century)