The Wright Brothers: Achieving Excellence Through Persistence
Today, many people today take for granted the ability to travel anywhere across the globe in the matter of hours. Manned flight has gone down in history as one of the most revolutionary inventions ever. There are some ideas that change the way humanity operates like, the car, modern medicine, and the railroad system. These inventions, along with airplanes, are critical to the advancement of society. Thanks to the Wright brothers innovation and their will to overcome failure, the world has been changed forever.
The impact of this breakthrough is astonishing for many reasons, one being how far we have taken the original idea and transformed it to the great commercial industry it is today. According to ATAG, there are roughly 100,000 flights scheduled per day.
All of these 100,000 daily flights all were made possible by the fascination, dedication and perseverance of the wright brothers.
Flying has been a fascination of mankind for nearly all of their existence. Many great minds have attempted to fly before the Wright brothers, including Di Vinci. None have been able to accomplish this before the two brothers who worked for a printing press and bike shop.
The success of these brothers was not an easy, one step process. They had to do lots of research, experimenting and fail an incredible amount of times to make their final breakthrough.
The Wright brothers failed so much yet every single time they fell, they got back up and attacked it from a new angle. They had times where they felt that flight was impossible
Failure is a part of life and without it none of the great inventions that people use every day would have possibly been created. The greatest innovators did not start out with the finished product and final innovation in mind. They started with one problem or product, found the problem and then began making multiple different iterations of ways to fix it. All but a few of their iterations actually made it and worked.
The Wright brothers wanted to fly so they studied flight by watching birds and researching flight, brainstormed and created an immense number of prototypes. Of their prototypes only a few proved to be successful. They had to study birds and motion to understand how to stay in the air. They then took the info they gathered and began making different models, many of which didn’t work. They finally got a glider to sort of work, they then modified and modified until they had successfully made the flying machine.
I personally couldn’t ever be able to fail and return to something like this so many times. The Wright brothers had an one of a kind talent for testing, failing and seeing their mistakes and learning from them. Every problem that they ran into, they would meet it head on and completely understand the issue then attack it. If they failed, they would find a new angle to hit it from. Many in their shoes would have either quit after failing so many times and hitting the same roadblocks, or they would have continuously looked at the problem and taken a similar angle as their previous attempt, which would lead them nowhere.
A lesson that anyone can take from the Wright brothers is that in anything that you do there will be a multitude of failures that you will have to overcome. We must learn to cope with our failures and spin them to our advantage. Failure is only failure if we let it defeat us. Looking back at the story of the right brothers it seems that they never truly failed, they learned over and over again.
I think that society needs to be more like the Wright brothers. Learning from misfortunes, accepting that the first product won’t be the best, and that you only fail when you give up, are all things that every person should live by. Motivation and dedication can take a person a very long way and may just lead them to the next big breakthrough.
