Thomas Edison remains the most prolific inventor America has ever seen. He secured more patents than any other innovator to date, and his countless inventions launched several industries. There are many lessons we can learn from Edison, especially those of us striving to create. Here are our favorite pearls of Edisonian wisdom. To let us know about some of yours, use our Feedback form.
Edison worked incessantly, often for 20 hours a day. Believe it or not, throughout history, this is the key ingredient found in the most consistently successful individuals.
Edison found his schooling utterly "repulsive." Everything was forced on him. He found it impossible to observe and learn the processes of nature simply by description, or to comprehend the alphabet and arithmetic just by rote. To Edison, it was always necessary to discover with his own eyes--to "do things" or "make things" himself--in order to learn. Edison said that to see for himself, to test things himself, "for one instant, was better than learning about something I had never seen for two hours..." What Edison realized is that to really learn something, people need hands-on experience. They need to be able to build knowledge for themselves.
Edison clearly sensed that invention and discovery are dependent on the total accumulation of knowledge, including information that temporarily gets forgotten. He was forever collecting curious and miscellaneous facts, and squirreling them away in his memory. Edison stressed the important role chance, or accident, plays in discovery. In other words, he found no fact too trivial, no piece of information too irrelevant, no idea too outlandish. It's as if he were perpetually conducting a brainstorming session with himself.
Edison wrote the book on perseverance, saying, "The trouble with other inventors is that they try a few things and quit. I never quit until I get what I want!"
Edison knew the value of learning from his mistakes. To find the right material for the filament of the light bulb, he went through countless materials almost randomly until he found one that worked.
