Why you should compare apples and oranges

Why you should compare apples and orangesWhy you should compare apples and orangesMany idioms in English have flummoxed me since I started learning the language in middle school. But one tops the list comparing apples and oranges. The first time I heard the phrase in my freshman year of college, it stopped me in my tracks. The conversation went something like thisThats like comparing apples and oranges.So what?You cant compare the twoFollow Ladders on FlipboardFollow Ladders magazines on Flipboard covering Happiness, Productivity, Job Satisfaction, Neuroscience, and moreWait, what? What do you mean I cant compare the two?Theyre too different.At this point, dear reader, you may want to turn around and look away. Im about to compare apples and oranges.Theyre both fruits. Theyre both round. They both have a slight tangy taste. Theyre about the same size. And they both grow on trees.Yes, theres more that unites apples and oranges than divides them. (Scott Sanford of the NASA Ames Researc h Center took this comparison a step further. He used infrared spectrometry to compare a Granny Smith apple and a Sunkist orange and showed that the spectra of the two fruits are strikingly similar. The study, with the tongue-in-cheek titleApples and Oranges A Comparison, was published in the satirical scientific magazine,Improbable Research.).Yet, the idiom thrives because, as human beings, were terrible at binnenseeing connections between seemingly dissimilar things, however minor their differences might be. Instead, we compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges. In ur professional lives, we look to the competitors in our own industry and copy from their playbooks. In our personal lives, we adopt the fashion sense of our friends and echo their political views. We use idioms like apples and oranges to stop the comparison conversation before it even begins.But to me, theres little to be learned from comparing similar things. Breakthroughs happen when we see the similarity in th e dissimilar and combine and recombine apples and oranges into a creative soup.Originality often consists in linking up ideas whose connection was not previously suspected, wrote William Beveridge in his 1957 book,The Art of Scientific Investigation. Decades later, Steve Jobs echoed the same sentiment Creativity is just connecting things, he said. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didnt really do it, they just saw something.Albert Einstein called this idea combinatory play, which he believed is the essential feature in productive thought. Combinatory play, as Elizabeth Gilbertdescribes it, is the act of opening up one mental channel by dabbling in another. During moments of difficulty, Einstein would grab his violin and play Mozart to decipher the music of the cosmos.Steve Jobs borrowed from calligraphy to create multiple typefaces and proportionally spaced fonts on the Macintosh. Leonardo da Vincis inspiration for art and te chnology also came from the outsidein his case, nature. Larry Page and Sergey Brin adopted an idea from academiathe frequency of citations to an academic paper indicates its popularityand applied it to search engines to create Google. In crafting his theory of evolution, Charles Darwin was inspired by the economist Thomas Malthus, who argued that populations tend to outgrow resources, creating a competition for survival.Darwin then began to ponder which populations are better situated than others to survive. In creating the printing press, Johannes Gutenberg was inspired by the equipment used for pressing wine grapes.Great musicians also use combinations. Iron Maidens music combines the unlikely elements of Shakespeare, history, and heavy metal. The late David Bowie was a master at re-mixing. As David Moldawerwrites, Bowie would assemble chunks of text from various sources, cut them up, and rearrange them to forge lyrics with surprising and memorable combinations of words, images, i deas. The legendary record producer Rick Rubintells his bandsnot to listen to popular songs while they produce an album. Instead, he says that theyre better off drawing inspiration from the worlds greatest museums than finding it in the current Billboard charts.But we cant combine ideas if we dont see the similarities between them. Most of us remain in our humanities track or science track and shut off our minds to concepts from across the aisle.Life, it turns out, doesnt happen in compartmentalized silos.Whats ordinary in one field is extraordinary in the other. A revolution in one industry can begin with the adoption of an idea from another. Yes, in many cases, the fit wont be perfect. But the mere act of comparison will spark new lines of thinking.The next time someone accuses you of comparing apples and oranges, wear it as a badge of honor. And dont stop with apples and oranges. If youre a doctor, attend a conference for real estate professionals. If youre an English major, lear n about quantum mechanics. If your day job is an engineer, pick up a copy of Homers Odyssey.When it comes to unleashing originality, nothing beats the cross-pollination of ideas from seemingly different places.Ozan Varol is a rocket scientist turned law professor and bestselling author.Click hereto download a free copy of his e-book, The Contrarian Handbook 8 Principles for Innovating Your Thinking. Along with your free e-book, youll get the Weekly Contrarian - a newsletter that challenges conventional wisdom and changes the way we look at the world (plus access to exclusive content for subscribers only).This article first appeared on OzanVarol.com.