Quotes For The Struggling Achiever

Going through the process of taking an idea and creating it into a useful, feasible, actual end product is a grueling experience. Its usually filled with potholes, setbacks, delays… you name it.

Keep your eyes open to that light at the end of the tunnel though, and you will eventually make it happen.

Some first-hand advice from one of our own famous inventors, Thomas Edison:

• Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.
  • This is presented as a statement of 1877, as quoted in From Telegraph to Light Bulb with Thomas Edison (2007) by Deborah Hedstrom, p. 22

• During all those years of experimentation and research, I never once made a discovery. All my work was deductive, and the results I achieved were those of invention, pure and simple. I would construct a theory and work on its lines until I found it was untenable. Then it would be discarded at once and another theory evolved. This was the only possible way for me to work out the problem. … I speak without exaggeration when I say that I have constructed 3,000 different theories in connection with the electric light, each one of them reasonable and apparently likely to be true. Yet only in two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory. My chief difficulty was in constructing the carbon filament. . . . Every quarter of the globe was ransacked by my agents, and all sorts of the queerest materials used, until finally the shred of bamboo, now utilized by us, was settled upon.
  • On his years of research in developing the electric light bulb, as quoted in “Talks with Edison” by George Parsons Lathrop in Harpers magazine, Vol. 80 (February 1890), p. 425

• Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration. Spoken statement (c. 1903); published in Harper’s Monthly (September 1932)
• Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.
• There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the labor of thinking.
• I believe in the existence of a Supreme Intelligence pervading the Universe.
• There is a great directing head of people and things — a Supreme Being who looks after the destinies of the world.
  I am convinced that the body is made up of entities that are intelligent and are directed by this Higher Power. When one cuts his finger, I believe it is the intelligence of these entities which heals the wound. When one is sick, it is the intelligence of these entities which brings convalescence. You know that there are living cells in the body so tiny that the microscope cannot find them at all. The entities that give life and soul to the human body are finer still and lie infinitely beyond the reach of our finest scientific instruments. When these entities leave the body, the body is like a ship without a rudder — deserted, motionless and dead.
• Restlessness is discontent — and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man — and I will show you a failure.
• Through all the years of experimenting and research, I never once made a discovery. I start where the last man left off. … All my work was deductive, and the results I achieved were those of invention pure and simple.
• So far as the religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake … Religion is all bunk.
• Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
• If we did all the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.
• I never did a day’s work in my life, it was all fun.
• To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk. – As quoted in Behavior-Based Robotics (1998) by Ronald C. Arkin. p. 8
• I find out what the world needs. Then, I go ahead and invent it.
• We don’t know a millionth of one percent about anything.
  As quoted in “The Limits of Knowledge and the Hope for Progress” by Francisco J. Ayala in God, Science, and Humility : Ten Scientists Consider Humility Theology (2000) by Robert L. Herrmann, p. 132
• Hell, there are no rules here — we’re trying to accomplish something.
  • As quoted in How to Think Like Einstein : Simple Ways to Break the Rules and Discover Your Hidden Genius (2000) by Scott Thorpe, p. 124

  Just because something doesn’t do what you planned it to do doesn’t mean it’s useless.

• I owe my success to the fact that I never had a clock in my workroom. Seventy-five of us worked twenty hours every day and slept only four hours — and thrived on it.
  • Diary entry, as quoted in Defending and Parenting Children Who Learn Differently : Lessons from Edison’s Mother (2007) by Scott Teel, p. 12

Listen and learn from the one of the worlds greatest inventors.