When a new discovery lands in your mind, it doesn’t just arrive — it splashes. It’s a drop of water falling into a still glass of water. But not gently — disruptively. It punches a crater into the surface, sending ripples outward, stirring mini-currents and eddies below, launching a column upward. Some discoveries rewire your neural circuitry and leave your physical brain altered — even if only microscopically. Discovery is not always quiet. Sometimes it is the Big Bang in miniature.
Take the Beatle Paul McCartney. One morning, he woke up with a melody in his head. Fully formed. Mysterious. “Yesterday.” He thought he must have heard it somewhere. But no — when he played it for John Lennon and George Martin, not even their encyclopedic knowledge of music could trace its source. It’s not a memory; it’s a splash. A perfect melody, so concretely formed that it seemed inevitable, and yet it came from nowhere. That’s the kind of discovery I’m talking about. Not the incremental, grind-it-out kind of discovery (those are good too). But the kind that hits you. Suddenly. Viscerally.
I remember when I was a kid coloring Easter eggs and it blew my little mind seeing a drop of blue dye change a whole glass of yellow water green. I didn’t know it would happen, and then — bam! — green was all I saw.
I call this a splash discovery. It’s not a lesson. It’s not even a method. It’s a moment. And it’s a moment that can be profound, changing the way you see things.
When the drop hits, the water doesn’t just ripple — it changes color. A true discovery alters the substance of your understanding. It changes the water itself. That’s the amazing thing: after that drop lands, there’s no going back. You can’t unsee the green. You can’t return to yellow. It’s like a baseball player with a 1.000 batting average: once it changes, it’s changed forever. Forever. That’s what discovery does. It alters the terrain.
And there’s more. That little drop of discovery? It doesn’t just stay in your cup. When you tell someone else — when you show them your discovery — they get hit with the same drop. Their water ripples. Their color changes. The splash happens again.
This is more than metaphor. This is physics. It’s neurology. When you make a discovery, your brain and body activate. Dopamine, endorphins, your amygdala fires. Pupils widen. Quickening of the heart. Blood flowing faster. That discovery creates energy inside you. And when you share it with others, it creates energy inside them.
For centuries the world has searched for a machine of perpetual motion. It exists. The machine of perpetual motion is called human discovery. When you pass on your discovery — when someone else sees what you saw, feels what you felt — the energy grows. The machine keeps running.
There’s something divine about that. Think of it: your discovery, once made, no longer belongs to you. It enters the ecosystem of ideas. It exists outside you. If multiple people can make the same discovery independently, it means the discovery itself was already there, like a glint of light on the wall waiting for someone to notice. And once noticed — splash — it’s real.
History oozes episodes of simultaneous discovery. Calculus, oxygen, the inventions of the telephone, the polio vaccine, the lightning rod, the microchip — these are all examples of multiple independent discoveries.
But these could just be coincidences, right? Just because multiple people may make the same discovery, that doesn’t necessarily mean ideas exist outside of the people who discover them.
Perhaps. But think of it this way, if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? If you write down a message on a piece of paper, but no one reads it, does the message exist? Yes, of course. All the same, if you have an idea but you do not communicate it to others, the idea still exists. The idea lives independently, regardless of how or if it gets communicated.
That green water? That’s you linking two disparate elements — yellow and blue — and creating something brand new. The singular link. That’s the definition of meaning: connection. Meaning is connection. Say it with me: meaning is connection. One moment it’s chaos, and the next it’s color.
Discoveries are like mutations in evolution. One tiny change leads to another, then another, then a chain reaction of possibility. The adjacent possible expands, as discussed here and here. New doors open that were invisible moments before. You grow. Your life becomes bigger. You expand in dimensions.
And if you stop discovering? What happens then? If you stop discovering or stop caring about discovery, you shrink. The water in your cup evaporates. Your world becomes smaller. Limited. Scarce. Dull. The cup becomes just a cup again. “Yesterday all my troubles seemed so far away, now it looks as though they’re here to stay.”
But if you keep making discoveries, each one adds volume to your glass, stirs activity, replenishes what time wants to steal. Maybe this is what aging really is: evaporation. And maybe the antidote isn’t youth serum or botox or cryogenic chambers, but simply… curiosity.
Live with curiosity, and your life becomes a kind of dance. Even if no one sees you dancing, the movement changes you. Like monks in cloisters praying the world into harmony, like writers writing things that only make sense to them until someone else reads them and says, “Yes! That’s true! I’ve felt that too.”
Discoveries are not solitary. They are communal events. In the movie Oppenheimer, someone announces that a team of scientists proved the atom can be split and suddenly everyone in the room has the same vision: a mushroom cloud. Splash! Insight is contagious. It builds. It forms bonds, relationships, networks. One person’s discovery becomes another’s springboard. That’s not just learning — it’s a chain reaction. That’s social discovery. That’s discovery propelling the movement of collective consciousness.
The creative process is not just how we build things. It’s how we become things. How we internalize our discoveries. It’s how we expand.
So look and listen closely. There are sights to see and sounds to hear, if you are paying attention. The wind rings the chimes, but you have to notice. Don’t just look — see! See what you’re looking at. Register it. Understand it. Because discovery is not rare, it’s just rarely noticed. Live alert. Live present. The drops are falling all the time.