Pushkin

Hello, Tim Hartford here. Today we're sharing something I'm very excited about, my third

TED Talk. It's about what we can learn from some of the most enduringly creative people.

They do something very interesting, something I call slow motion multitasking. I mean that

they actively juggle multiple projects and move between topics as the mood strikes. By

cross-training their minds, innovators such as Einstein, Darwin, Tyler Tharp and Michael

Criton discovered their inspiration. If you like it, you can hear my other TED Talks,

along with talks from much smarter, more charismatic and more original people than me, on the TED Talks

daily podcast, wherever you listen to podcasts.

To do two things at once is to do neither. It's a great smackdown of multitasking, isn't

it? Often attributed to the Roman writer, Poblilius Cirrus, although you know how these things

are, he probably never said it. What I'm interested in though is it true? I mean it's obviously

true for emailing at the dinner table or texting while driving, or possibly for live tweeting

a TED Talk as well. But I'd like to argue that for an important kind of activity, doing

two things at once or three or even four is exactly what we should be aiming for. Look

at no further than Albert Einstein. In 1905, he published four remarkable scientific papers.

One of them was on Brownian motion. It provided empirical evidence that atoms exist and it laid

out the basic mathematics behind most of financial economics. Another one was on the theory

of special relativity. Another one was on the photoelectric effect. That's why solar panels

work. It's a nice one. It gave him the Nobel Prize for that one. And the fourth introduced

an equation you might have heard of, e equals mc squared. So tell me again how you shouldn't

do several things at once. Now obviously working simultaneously on Brownian motion, special

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