Isaacson: Creativity required for success

Isaacson is currently the CEO of the Aspen Institute and was the former chairman and CEO of CNN and a former TIME magazine managing editor. He is chairman of the board of trustees of Teach For America and a former vice chairman of the Louisiana Recovery Authority.

Isaacson explained that creativity was an important force in the lives of many of the subjects of his biographies, and it is this same kind of creativity that must be employed to solve the problems facing society today.

“For me,” he said, “[creativity] involves being slightly rebellious, questioning the conventional order.”

Isaacson’s newest book is “Einstein: His Life and His Universe.” He is also the author of “Benjamin Franklin: An American Life” and co-author of “Wise Men: Six Friends and the World they Made” with Newsweek editor and journalism professor Evan Thomas.

Isaacson explained that many of his subjects used creative means to achieve their success. “Each of them in their own way, though differently, were creative ... and that’s what set them apart in their fields,” he said.

Benjamin Franklin was rebellious from childhood, and it was “the rebelliousness that distinguishes him,” Isaacson noted.

As a 15-year old apprentice in his older brother’s print shop, Franklin began to write witty essays under a pseudonym — assuming the persona of an elderly woman — to get published in a newspaper.

“It’s an absolute triumph of the imagination,” Isaacson said, adding that Franklin ran away from home at age 17 and employed true creativity in reinventing himself in Philadelphia.

Creativity served a different purpose in Einstein’s life.

“It was a very solitary, great-leaps-of-imagination, questioning-at-all-times-the-conventional-wisdom and thinking-outside-of-the-box [kind of mentality],” Isaacson said.

From a young age, Einstein frustrated his teachers with his incessant questioning. “Everything was totally given in science, and he said, ‘but how do we know it,’ ” Isaacson explained. But Einstein’s creativity eventually played a central role in the development of the theory of relativity.

“Einstein basically makes the greatest conceptual leap of that time in physics ... by a pure imaginative conceptual leap,” Isaacson said, referring to Einstein’s famous thought experiment in which he envisioned moving trains to consider the idea of simultaneity.

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Creativity must be used to address today’s problems of the war on terror and the global financial crisis, he said.

“We have not done the creative conceptualizing,” Isaacson said. “We are still using Voice of America and Radio Free Europe instead of getting the people who created Facebook and Google to come up with new ways to use social networking.”

He explained that the reliance on old institutions created for a different set of global problems “shows a lack of creativity” in today’s society. He added that the administration of President-elect Barack Obama must address pressing problems in creative ways.