try, try again

Just about everyone is familiar with the famous quotation by Thomas Edison that “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.”

He prefaced this by stating the obvious “There is no substitute for hard work.”

Boy, did he know what he was talking about! The whole idea of “Building the Better Mousetrap” as a sure-fire-get-rich-quick-scheme is the biggest myth since alchemy.

We have just celebrated the 125th anniversary of Mr. Edison’s miracle when he pulled the switch on September 4, 1882 and lit up half a square mile of downtown Manhattan. This spectacular moment was preceded by years of hard work and experimentation with no fewer than 3,000 theories about electric light. In only two cases did his experiment work – but work they eventually did and changed our world forever. Small wonder he also said “Many of life’s failures are people who did not know how close they were to success when they gave up.”

History is rife with such stories: it took five years of toil in an obscure Ohio cow pasture to launch the historic 12-second flight in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in December of 1903.

Walt Disney was so broke after a series of financial flops that he was stranded shoeless in his office because he could not afford the $1.50 to reclaim them from the repair shop.

Henry Ford failed with one company and was forced out of another before he got on the road to the Model T.

And on it goes to the modern world... the trials Steve Jobs faced in creating Apple... then suffering the humiliation of getting fired from the company he founded... only to come back stronger than ever.

And Bill Gates didn’t just wake up one morning, put finger to keyboard and give birth to Microsoft.

So, hang in there – hardly any innovation works the first time, and in our accelerated society there is a great hue and cry for instant gratification (with an active media ready to pounce and expose) – a trend made worse by things like Wall Street’s tireless obsession with quarterly earnings. You will receive much discouragement along the way. Turn a deaf ear, and persevere.

And when success does come, it’s that much sweeter – Ted Turner with CNN, Jeff Bezos with Amazon.com and Al Neuharth with USA Today all surfed to the shore of success on waves and waves of ridicule.

Who’s laughing all the way to the bank now?