This article is part of GE’s Dare to Do collection that explores the imagination and curiosity of those who dare to do great things. At GE, we don’t just dream of a world that works better. We build it (sometimes with Quirky’s help).
Today we pay tribute a unique breed of human being. Those who throw away all preconceived notions of what should be and bring to light the potential of what could be.
No one embodied this spirit more than Thomas Edison. It’s only appropriate, then, that his birthday should be National Inventors’ Day.
Now, we all know a certain Edison. Dignified older dude who wore dope three-piece suits and had lots of gray hair.
He was so smart they named half of New Jersey after him.
So incredibly intelligent that people have spent the last 100 years arguing about the fact that someone he knew might have been more intelligenter than him.
Edison had it going on. In his day, he was the center of every technological conversation.
Unfortunately, studying Edison in his later years, the well-dressed man with incredible composure, doesn’t teach you much.
To find out how a single guy had such a profound impact on the world you have to rewind.
There’s a common theme that connects the young Edison’s with some of the world’s greatest disruptors…. They broke things, and their parents encouraged (or at least embraced) it.
Before Edison was Edison, he was just Tom. An elementary school boy who nearly burned down his parents house several times with “experiments”. Edison couldn’t even make it through the first few months of grade school because he was getting himself in too much trouble.
Before he was a maker, he was a breaker.
Most people stop breaking, because their parents (or straight-up common sense) tell them to. Go to school, get a good job, live a regular life.
But Edison’s parents embraced his unique (err.. Quirky) style. Edison said of his mother,
“My mother was the making of me. She was so true, so sure of me; and I felt I had something to live for …”
While most salute the three-piece-suit Edison, I am most enamored by his mom, Nancy- and her willingness to believe that Tom’s tinkering could lead to a better world.
It’s hard to come across an inventor that doesn’t have a figure like Edison’s Nancy in their life. At Quirky, I spend the majority of my day with all types of creative folks.
In our growing community of inventors, we see everything from a stay-at-home mom who figures out how to build a unique toy for her kid to play with, all the way up to brilliant Ph.D’s at GE’s Global Research Center in upstate New York who are working on new types of electrical load dissipation.
The one thing they all have in common: someone gave them the confidence to break- and that confidence gave them the stamina needed in order to make.
For me, it was my parents. I had a 1.7 GPA my junior year of high school, and I hardly ever went to class. Instead being discouraged by my inability to fit in, my parents focused on the things I was good at. They remortgaged their house to let me start my first company.
While “making” is often intimidating to the average person, breaking is by all means something we can feel confident in our ability to do.
The good news is a wise, gray haired dude in a three-piece-suit once (more eloquently) said, if you break things for long enough you’ll make important things…. ☺
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” — Thomas Edison, Breaker.
On National Inventors Day, join me in commemorating those around you who give you the confidence you need to break things.
It’s the Nancy & Samuel Edisons of the world that truly Make Invention Accessible.
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