Another characteristic of truly innovative and creative people is that they have around them a field of distortion of reality, a phrase used for Steve Jobs and first heard in an episode of Star Trek where aliens create an entirely new world solely through their mental power. When his colleagues complained that some of Jobs' ideas or proposals were impossible to implement, he used a trick he had learned from a guru in India: he would look at them without blinking and say, "Don't be afraid. You can do it." It usually worked. Jobs annoyed people, distracted them, but also pushed them to do things they didn't believe they could do.
Related is the ability to "think differently," as Jobs put it in Apple's now famous advertisements. The scientific community in the early twentieth century was trying to understand how the speed of light could appear to remain constant regardless of the speed at which the observer was approaching or moving away from the source. At that time, Albert Einstein was a third-class clerk at a patent office in Switzerland and was studying devices that sent signals to various clocks to synchronize them. And then he had an idea that would change the world.
