Exercise for Initiation 7

Read the following article and answer the questions provided. Don’t forget to read the
instruction carefully.
Pure Genius
Thomas Edison was granted 1,093 patents for inventions that ranged from the light
bulb, typewriter, electric pen, phonograph, motion picture camera, and alkaline storage
battery – to the talking doll and a concrete house that could be built in one day from a cast-
iron mold. When he died in 1931, he left 3,500 notebooks which are preserved today in
temperature – controlled vaults of the West Orange Laboratory Archives at the Edison
National Historic Site in New Jersey. The pages read like a turbulent brainstorm and present
a verbal and visual biography of Edison’s mind at work.
Here are a few creativity lessons that emerge from a review of the way he worked:
1. Challenge All Assumptions.
Before hiring an assistant, Edison would invite the candidate over for soup. If the
person salted the soup before tasting it, Edison would not hire him for the job. He did
not hire people who had too many assumptions built into their everyday life. He
wanted people who consistently challenged assumptions.

2. Quantity.
He believed to discover a good idea you had to generate many ideas. Out of quantity
comes quality. He set quotas for all his workers. His own quota was one minor invention
every 10 days and a major invention every six months. It took over 50,000 experiments
to invent the alkaline storage cell battery and 9,000 to perfect the light bulb. Edison
looked at creativity as simply good, honest, hard work. Genius, he once said, is 99%
perspiration and 1% inspiration. For every brilliant idea he had there was a dud like the
horse-drawn contraption that would collect snow and ice in the winter and compress it
into blocks that families could use in the summer as a refrigerant.

3. Nothing is Wasted.
When an experiment failed, he would always ask what the failure revealed and
would enthusiastically record what he had learned. His notebooks contain pages of
material on what he learned from his abortive ideas, including his many experiments on
will power. He conducted countless experiments with rubber tubes extended from his
forehead trying to will the physical movement of a pendulum. Once when an assistant
asked why he continued to persist trying to discover a long-lasting filament for the light
bulb after failing thousand od times, Edison explained that he didn’t understand the
question. In his mind he hadn’t failed once. Instead, he completed Patent 251,539 for
the light bulb that ensured his fame and fortune. Whenever he succeeded with a new
idea, he would review his notebooks to rethink ideas and inventions he’d abandoned in
the past in the light of what he’d recently learned.
4. Constantly Improve Your Ideas and Products and the Ideas and Products of Others.
Contrary to popular belief, Edison did not invent the light bulb: his genius, rather,
was to perfect the bulb as a consumer item. Edison also studied all his inventions and
ideas as springboards for other inventions and ideas on their own right. To Edison, the
telephone (sound transmitted) suggested the phonograph (sound recorded), which
suggested motion pictures (images recorded). Simple, in retrospect, isn’t it? Genius
usually is.
Edison would often jot down titles of books, failed patents, and research papers
written by other inventors. He would research them and try to figure out where those
inventors quit or left off, so his own patentable work could begin. He advised his
assistants to adapt the ideas of others. He told them to make it a habit to keep on the
lookout for novel and interesting ideas that others have used successfully. To Edison,
your idea needs to be original only in its adaptation to the problem you are working on.

5. Turn Deficiencies to Your Advantage.

No one knows for sure what caused Edison’s hearing problems, but after the age of
twelve he could no longer hear birds singing. As a teenager working in a telegraph office
jammed with clattering telegraph machines, he viewed his poor hearing as a distinct
advantage because he could focus on his instrument on his desk and not be distracted.
As a renowned inventor, he received pleas from hearing-impaired people all over the
world to invent a hearing aid, but he declined believing this so-called disability gave him
valuable mental space in which to think.

6. Record Your Ideas and Thoughts.

Edison had a deep-seated need to articulate his ideas on paper, to see for himself
the relentlessly cause-and-effect nature of many of his works. Leonardo da Vinci was
Edison’s spiritual mentor, and his notebooks illustrate the depth of their kinship. An
obsessive draftsman, hoarder of ideas, supreme egoist, engineer, and botanist – a
conceptual inventor, scientist, and mathematician, Edison recorded and illustrated
every step on his voyage to discovery.

Source: “Pure Genius” from Psychology Today (Michael Michalko)

Exercise
Inferring Character from Actions: True or False. Based on what you have read about
Edison’s life and actions, which of the following inferences about his character are true?
Place T in front of those and F in front of the inferences that do not apply to Edison
(10 points). Support your choices with facts from the reading (10 points).

1. ………….a confirmed pessimist

2. ………….a strict and demanding boss
3. ………….a well-rounded individual with many hobbies and interests
4. ………….a workaholic
5. ………….an easy-going man who had many brilliant ideas
6. ………….an original thinker with no need to study the works of others
7. ………….an outgoing family man with lots of friends
8. …………..generous and compassionate
9. …………..patient, careful, and disciplined
10. …………..sloppy and badly organized