Welcome

Take two unrelated ideas, connect them together to create a new, innovative idea, and what do you have? You have a singular link.

This blog explores a dynamic playground where independent ideas meet, mingle, merge, and give birth to extraordinary new ideas. Think of it as a particle collider for concepts — WHAM! From science to art to sports to business, come explore the ways in which sparks of creativity smash together with inspiring results.

singular links [ sing-gyuh-ler lingks ]

+ Transformations born from the art of creative and intuitive combinations
+ Unexpected connections that shift the scale or scope of what’s possible
+ Fresh innovation sparked by the power of novel combinations

Dinner with History

This week someone posed the question, “If you could have dinner with any historical figure, who would it be?”         My first thought was to choose the most unconventional person possible. I mean, the purpose of this…

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Claude Shannon: Boolean Algebra and Circuit Design

Claude Shannon really enjoyed thinking about problems and tinkering with mechanical devices, but he was not a big fan of publishing papers. Throughout his life, he kept copious notes, sketches, and personal journals related to his work and ideas, mathematical…

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Claude Shannon: Patterns Erase Uncertainty

In a previous post, we talked about how the decision-making process is the act of rescuing one potentiality from a field of uncertainty and delivering it permanently into the certainty of your past. Think about that for a moment. When…

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Claude Shannon: Overcoming Noise

The hedge fund manager Michael Burry said he met his wife through the dating site Match.com with a profile that read, “I am a medical student with only one eye, an awkward social manner, and $145,000 in student loans.” Burry…

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Claude Shannon: Bits of Information

This is the first of a series of posts about Claude Shannon, mathematician, engineer, and computer scientist whose work beginning in the late ’30s helped to define the Information Age that emerged over the subsequent decades. Shannon is largely credited…

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Bruce Lee: The Formless Form

In recent posts about Bruce Lee, we looked at his technical prowess as a fighter, including his use of the one-inch punch and the stop-hit, as well as a fight that exposed the limitations of his approach. By 1964, at…

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Bruce Lee: How Small Defeats Large

In hand-to-hand combat, being taller has advantages, all else equal. If you are taller than your opponent, your reach will tend to be longer than your opponent’s, meaning you can strike from a distance that is outside your opponent’s range.…

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Bruce Lee: Becoming Water

The year was 1964. The scene was a small residential garage in Oakland, California, that served as a martial-arts school run by Bruce Lee. The space was cluttered with homemade sparring devices pieced together by Bruce’s assistant James, who was…

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Bruce Lee and the One-Inch Punch

Bruce Lee was neither tall nor heavy, but he could beat up larger opponents. What he lacked in brawn, he made up in speed, smarts, and heart. He also knew how to put on a show. The son of an…

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Life Size

When you are born, your world is small. Small eyes. Small ears. Small face brushing against your small blanket. As you start to learn, your world grows. It gets filled with images and sounds and discoveries. Stuff reveals itself to…

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Handy Devices for Changing Your Perspective

A recurring theme in this blog is about connecting the unconnected. But how do you know when unconnected things can be connected? Sometimes it helps to change your perspective. Here are a few metaphorical machines that can help you do…

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From Entropy to Order

Let’s unpack the concept of entropy, which is an abstract term loosely connected to the idea of randomness. The term “entropy” appears in different fields of study with different meanings. In thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, entropy describes the disorder or…

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The Thrill of Creating Complexity

I’m fascinated with this idea that simple things can interact to create complex results. Think about that for a moment. Sometimes you can combine things in such a way as to create properties that are greater than the properties of…

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Changes, Sudden Changes

When observing singular links, you see one thing joining to another thing to create some new thing. Sperm joining egg creates a zygote. A spark joining gunpowder creates ignition. A hot poker from the fireplace joining water creates steam. In…

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The Power of Reciprocity

When two elements join together to propagate something new, there exists a certain reciprocity in the relationship. The term reciprocity speaks to the way they interact and the way they influence each other. You can see examples of reciprocal relationships…

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Changing Scope, Changing Scale

There is a riddle that asks how a prisoner could escape over a high wall without leaving any evidence. How could he pull it off? The name of the riddle reveals how. It is called the Ice Block Wall Escape.…

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Murder Your Darlings

An essential step in developing good ideas is discarding bad ones. The writers’ vivid expression “Murder your darlings” suggests that even your favorite ideas should be trashed if they don’t advance your project. You might have meticulously crafted the most…

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Who Benefits from Making Connections?

When I moved to New York City in my twenties, I was determined to forge a career as a working artist. In that Darwinian pool of ambition, the most successful artists were the ones who could generate a dependable stream…

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The Four-C Process of Ideation

It has been said that writers don’t necessarily have more ideas than other people; it’s just that they notice when they do have ideas. Writers develop a sort of metacognition, which is an awareness of one’s own thought process. In…

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Linking by Refraction

In the post The Three Types of Transformation, we discussed refracting as one of the three types of transformation, along with expanding and contracting. You can read the full post here. Recall, refracting is when you transform something by changing…

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The Three Types of Transformation

Many of these blog posts discuss practices you can use to discover singular links. These fall into three categories, each involving a different way of transforming the subject of your work. They include, Expanding, when you transform something by creating…

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The Potential of Peculiar Pairings

“The best ideas are born from the union of disparate thoughts.” – Unknown   Befor September 11, 2001, the idea to take down skyscrapers using commercial airplanes had not occurred to many people. It had obviously occurred to some people,…

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Different Finds for Different Minds

You may wonder if anyone can put together singular links, or if certain people are better at it than others. Spoiler alert, yes, anyone can. However, since there are many different kinds of brains, some people are better at making…

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Wanted: A Predictable World to Punch

Sometimes it seems that everything in the known universe has already been comprehensively explored, discovered, labeled, mapped, dissected, cross-examined, catalogued, abbreviated, acronymified, domain-named, and proffered at the low low price. “Operators are standing by!”  Google Maps has rendered naked every…

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Never Lose Sight of Visitor Eyes

I remember my first visit to New York City when I walked into a deli to order some breakfast. There was a cacophony of activity and voices and characters scurrying around like ants in a tree stump. Someone yelled from…

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Vocab

singular [ sing-gyuh-ler ] adjective being one of a kind; unique exceptional; extraordinary; remarkable unusual; conspicuous link [ lingk ] noun a bond between one part and another anything serving to connect two things or situations, especially where one may…

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The Path of the Intuitive Slinker

Here is a metaphor in three parts. Part One Imagine you spent your whole life in an underground cave. You were born in the cave and you grew up there. You were unaware that anything existed outside your cave. All…

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Becoming the Person You’re Becoming

How do you consciously link the person you are now to the person you will become in the future? The first step is to recognize that you are a complex creature made up of many parts. Although you go by…

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Individuation and the Paradox of Personhood

I really like the concept of individuation, which speaks to a process of becoming individualized, distinct, unique, recognizable. Individuation is the opposite of assimilation, homogenization, blending in. Individuation is the moth that emerges among caterpillars. It’s the flower growing from…

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Stereotypes Have No Fingerprints

As I said in the previous post, when I was a teenager, the two most important adult role models who were not my parents were a former WWII soldier in the German army named Kurt and a concentration camp survivor…

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Linking Opposite Sides of History

When I was a teenager, the two most important adult role models who were not my parents were a former WWII soldier in the German army named Kurt and a concentration camp survivor named Saul. I met Kurt when I…

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The Catalyst

When I was a teenager, I had a pet mouse. I enjoyed holding it in my hand and walking around the house with it. Pretty soon I was leaving the house with the mouse. Eventually I started carrying it with…

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The Singular Influence of Time

Imagine that time is a road. If you look in one direction you see the past, and the other direction shows the future. The place on that road where you currently stand is the present. Take a moment and visualize…

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Gaining By Subtracting

So far we have been diving into singular links in the context of adding one thing to another thing to create an altogether new thing. This describes a cumulative process. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.…

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Transformation, Sudden and Total

When I was 19, I was alone in a hospital room with my grandmother when she passed away. The term “passed away” seems spot-on from my perspective then, as it does now, because what I witnessed was a kind of…

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Sound Links

Let’s talk about music. Let’s talk about how musical notes can create singular links. When you play a note on a piano or any instrument, you are actually hearing several notes wrapped together. Let’s say you play what piano players…

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The Animating Power of Myth

The previous post talked about what motivates us to do what we do. It addressed the concepts of collaborative motivation (primarily seeking to benefit others) and individual motivation (primarily seeking to benefit the self). There is, however, another source of…

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What Motivates You to Make Links?

There are generally two types of motivation for finding singular links: collaborative motivation and individual motivation. Collaborative motivation primarily seeks to benefit others; individual motivation primarily seeks to benefit the self. Collaborative is outward-facing; individual is inward-facing. Let’s unpack them…

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Skill Creates Scale

Let’s dive deeper into the topic of emergent properties, which are the unique characteristics that result from connecting some underlying components. The high school student creates emergent properties by mixing vinegar and baking soda to simulate the frothing lava of…

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Emergent Properties

When you combine various elements to create singular links, the resulting unions exhibit emergent properties. These properties spring into existence from the interaction of the underlying components. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Or, the whole…

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The Exhilaration of Discovery

When you notice something that’s exciting, it creates energy in your brain and your body. Kids demonstrate this most vividly when excitement jolts through them and they leap in the air, clap and flap, shriek and squeal. Their excitement on…

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Notice and Be Noticed

Inside your skull, your brain is floating in a silky goo. your brain resembles other brains. If someone were to scoop your brain out of your head and plop it on a counter, you wouldn’t be able to identify it…

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When You Are Blind to What You See

A toddler, held in his mother’s arms, sees a puppy and points at it. “Puppy,” his mom says, training the boy to associate the word with the dog. “It’s a puppy.” The baby holds his gaze, transfixed, and keeps pointing.…

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Orthogonal Links

Let’s unpack the concept of orthogonal influences that we introduced in a recent post. Everyone is familiar with the word diagonal, but the word orthogonal could use a little introduction. Diagonal describes a line that intersects one or more lines…

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Unconventional Thinking As Act of Rebellion

If we are going to pioneer original work, we have to be willing to reject conventional thinking and forge new mental paths on our own. Let’s unpack this by first exploring conventional thinking. One day, XYZ Corporation announces it has…

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Lateral Thinking 

There once was a man who was a merchant and father of a teenage daughter. Through a series of mishaps, he found himself unable to pay his debt to a money lender. The money lender proposed a bargain: he would…

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Convergent Linking

In our last post we discussed divergent thinking, which is the thought process used to generate many ideas related to a subject in a short amount of time. Quantity is key. The goal is to create as many ideas as…

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Divergent Linking

“The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.” – Linus Pauling A great tool for making links is divergent thinking. Divergent thinking is a thought process used to generate many ideas related to a subject…

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Survival of the Slinkest

Our story begins three million years ago in patch of African lowlands where a monkey-like hominid named Lucy is scurrying away from her hominid companion. There were 3 signs that her companion was not having a good day. 1) the…

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Learning to Fail Forward

Remember the story of Italian engineer and Nobel Prize winner G. Marconi, inventor of radio. As radio equipment began to get more powerful, he could transmit signals across greater distances. He thought that if he had strong enough equipment, he…

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The Power of Whimsy

Have you gone out to play today? People need playtime. Especially adults. Especially serious adults. Especially serious adults who think they have no time for playtime. Whimsy (noun) – playfully quaint or fanciful behavior or humor; a whim; a thing…

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Did You Spot the Gorilla?

The “Invisible Gorilla Test” was an experiment that showed participants a short video showing players in white shirts and players in black shirts dribbling a basketball and passing among them. The test asked participants to count how many times the…

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A Face in the Sky

Last night the moon appeared as a tiny sliver. Above it was one bright star. Someone proclaimed the star was actually the planet Venus. My mind likened the crescent moon to a smiling mouth in the sky. Then I realized…

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The Paradox of Simplicity

It’s hard to look at something familiar and see it in a new way. But that is what we often must do when we work with the same material over and over again. Musicians use the same 12 notes. Artists…

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The Gen-Z/COVID Link

If our definition of a Singular Link is the union of unrelated elements resulting in something new, the epoch-making Link of our era has been COVID-19. Think about it. Over the course of about a year the virus went from…

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The Silk Road of Inspiration

There are popular myths that claim some creative works manifest spontaneously in their final, completed form like stars falling from the sky. The Beatle Paul McCartney allegedly woke up one morning with the song Yesterday in his head, and that…

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Angel in One Ear/Devil in the Other

Sitting down and staring at the blank slate of a new project can be intimidating, and it can fill our minds with both excitement and dread. Where do we find the inspiration for our work? How do we identify the…

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Divergent Perspectives

I love to fly. This is fortunate, I suppose, because I seem do it a lot. Perhaps I was a bird in a previous life. The most interesting part of airplane travel is the ascent from the ground up to…

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Singular Links from the Perspective of AI

“How can individuals identify links among seemingly unrelated influences to make innovative new discoveries?” I asked that question to OpenAI/ChatGPT and, in about 30 seconds, I received this persuasive response… Identifying links among seemingly unrelated influences to make innovative new…

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The Mother of Invention

Where do you discover new ideas? How do you find inspiration? What gives you new perspectives? What is the flash that takes you from something routine and conventional to something rare and extraordinary? How do you learn to create? How…

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From Popcorn to the Birth of the Universe

Once you start noticing lucky links, when individuals stumble upon something that was completely unexpected, previously unimagined, and altogether novel, we begin to see how frequently they appeared in history. In fact, many recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics…

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Lucky Links

History is crowded with countless individuals who set out to find something but ended up finding a variation of what they were seeking. Columbus happened upon the Americas while looking for the Spice Islands of Asia. Edison discovered that bamboo…

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Linking Persistence with Spontaneity

A singular link is the fusion of independent elements that together form something novel. One classic archetype of a singular link is the romantic couple. Two people unite to create the relationship, which is its very own entity: the couple-entity.…

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The Singular World of Dreams

“An amazing number of ideas that shape our 20th century lives came first as inspirations in dreams. Philo T Fransworth dreamed the basic idea for t.v. When he was still a kid in high school. Elias Howe invented the sewing…

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One Percent Inspiration

“Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” This quote, attributed to Thomas Edison, emphasizes the importance of dedication, of commitment, of stick-to-itiveness. Those are fine qualities for a person to possess. But to me, the really interesting question…

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Welcome!

SingularLinks is a site devoted to the creative fusion of independent elements. Here we explore the union of influences resulting in novel ideas, perspectives, transformations, innovations. This is where we dissect the anatomy of inspiration and savor the intoxicating aroma…

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