Thinking Continuously: how adopting Isaac Newton’s approach would improve your business

2-11-2013 | Ian

One of my clients last week acclaimed me as a genius with numbers, as I’d prepared a complex cashflow model that gave him every permutation imaginable on product unit sales and prices for his business forecasts. I smiled and replied that the accolade of ‘a genius with numbers’ belonged to one man – Isaac Newton – who had always been someone I revered. Maths is like love – a simple idea but it can get complicated, and some of Newton’s thinking was undoubtedly the mark of a genius, in the language of mathematics.

It has been said that the main difference between a genius and an ordinary man, is only that a genius knows how to think, rather than what to think. Often the word genius is accompanied by words like creativity, or maybe it is their IQ, or some combination of the two that sets them apart from the rest.

Maybe there is more. Geniuses look for entirely new concepts and believe that anything is possible. It is this belief that leads them to approach problems in different ways – often a genius will see connections and patterns where the majority of people don’t. So what makes a genius? Let’s look at Isaac Newton to see if we can identify some traits, and how we can learn from them to enhance our own thinking styles.

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