Fritz Grobe says he already has had four lifetimes, and none of them include being a mathematician. His parents were mathematicians, and he went to Yale pursuing that same interest.

Yet something did not quite add up for Mr. Grobe. He left Yale to become a juggler. Yes, a juggler. Then he got into clowning followed by becoming an internet video sensation and writing books. 

“All of which is about the same curiosity. How does this work? What does this do?” he said on Tuesday, April 7, before presenting “Methods to the Madness — Unlocking Creativity” in Gilchrist Auditorium.

Mr. Grobe won five gold medals at the International Jugglers Championships; was the lead actor and featured solo clown in “Birdhouse Factory,” a touring Cirque du Soleil spin-off; and teamed with Stephen Voltz to take the idea of dropping Mentos candies into soda and turn it into a huge Internet phenomenon. Mr. Grobe and Mr. Voltz are co-creators of EepyBird, which describes itself as entertainment for the curious mind where ordinary objects do extraordinary things. Mr. Grobe’s latest book, which he co-authored with Amelia Klem Osterud, is The 388 Tattoos of Captain George, the story of a famous tattooed performer. 

Mr. Grobe began his presentation on Tuesday by telling students that that process and hard work can unlock creativity in anyone.   

“There is this misconception that there are two kinds of people, that there are creative people and the rest of us,” Mr. Grobe, the uncle of English teacher Zach Grobe, said. “In my experience that is just not true. Every single one of us has the potential to do extraordinary things. ... There is a method to this madness, there is a process used time and time again.”

He calls it 1-10-100. In the simplest form of this process, 1 represents the initial or raw idea, 10 the first proof of concept for a finished project, and 100 where the idea becomes something unforgettable. There will be failure along the way, but one must keep going, he said.

“You take things forward one step at a time,” Mr. Grobe said. “This is a methodical process. No genius involved. I don’t believe in genius. I believe in hard work.” When he wakes up in the morning, he said, he doesn’t say to himself, “‘Today I am going to change the world with a brilliant idea.’ ... What I do say in the morning is I am going to try to move things one step forward. The myth of creativity is you go from 1 to 100. I’ve never seen that. What I have seen, what I have done, what you can do, is go one step at a time.” Even if it takes 100 steps.

Mr. Grobe and Mr. Voltz went one step at a time with their initial viral video, referred to on their website, EepyBird.com, as the “infamous Extreme Diet Coke & Mentos Experiments.” They weren’t the first people to discover that dropping Mentos into soda creates a geyser, but they were the ones who turned it into an Internet sensation. Two days after their first video — in which they dropped 500 Mentos into more than 100 two-liter bottles of Diet Coke — went online, The Late Show with David Letterman called. Then Late Night with Conan O’Brien and NPR’s All Things Considered called. Their Diet Coke & Mentos videos are estimated to have been seen more than 120 million times.

What next after Mentos and Diet Coke? They figured there had to be something out there.

“We took our whole team, six people, down to the local Office Max store,” Mr. Grobe said. “We spent four hours going up and down the aisles looking at things, fiddling with them, making notes on a clipboard, and in the process freaking out the Office Max employees. One of them finally came up to me and said, ‘Are you from headquarters? Are we in some kind of trouble?’ I reassured him, and then we started buying things like normal people, although we left with way more than normal people. We left with a car full of random stuff.”

One of the items was Post-it notes. That would eventually lead to another widely seen video — a waterfall of cascading sticky notes. The final total was 280,951 sticky notes, which EepyBird.com says would make a solid stripe more than 13 miles long. The Post-it notes were provided by 3M, the company that makes them. Mr. Grobe demonstrated a mini-version of the sticky notes waterfall during his presentation in Gilchrist.

The dynamic duo of Grobe and Voltz eventually returned to the Letterman show when the late-night host drove their rocket car powered by Coke and Mentos on a New York street. EepyBird has worked for global brands such as Disney, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; won four Webby Awards; received two Emmy nominations; and performed around the world. 

Mr. Grobe may not be a genius, but he certainly is ingenious.