If ever there was a guy who deserved to feel down on his luck, it was Thomas Edison.
Born into a lower middle class family, Thomas's entrepreneurial father Samuel teetered in-and-out-of-the-money throughout Edison's life. The youngest of 7 children, Edison's parents could barely afford to send Thomas to school. Even more grueling, following an accident at the age of 15, Thomas became permanently deaf in his left ear.
If that didn't make things challenging enough, Edison was fired 4 times in 2 years as a young teenager. (Edison's employers did not relish the occasional explosions caused by his experiments!) So, at age 16, Edison was broke, partially deaf, and 100% unemployable within 50 miles of his Port Huron, Michigan home.
Yet, Edison didn't let these setbacks get the better of him. Instead, his life challenges led him to become a rock-solid optimist.
Edison Used 4 Methods to Maintain His Optimism and His Innovation Power
Born just prior to the Civil War, Edison's 62-year career spanned 3 recessions as well as the Stock Market Crash of 1929. He almost went bankrupt twice - once in his mid-50's and once at about age 65. Despite these difficulties, Edison received patents every single year of his career, from 1869 through 1931 - a record that still stands today.
Here are 4 approaches Edison used to cultivate what I've termed his "Charismatic Optimism" (taken from Innovation Competency #1: Solution-centered Mindset):
- Edison cultivated a "success mindset" by focusing on solutions instead of problems.
- Edison imagined a future state when developing his solutions, rather than attacking them from a present-day mindset.
- Edison did not believe in failure - he dealt with all setbacks as "learning."
- Edison had a life purpose...nothing was ever 100% "hopeless" and no situation was totally dire because his work was designed to benefit all humanity, not just himself.
Let's take a quick look at these 4 approaches, along with specific steps on how you can become a "Charismatic Optimist" in these tough times.
1) A "Success Mindset" Breeds Optimism
Think and Grow Rich author Napoleon Hill wrote extensively about the success mindset evident in Edison's work. Hill's interviews with Edison offer us clues on 3 key steps that enabled Edison to cultivate success thinking for over 60 years: 1) he never took setbacks personally; 2) he viewed every difficulty as temporary; and 3) he viewed each difficulty in isolation, never allowing it to flow into other parts of his life.
For example, we can see Edison exercising these qualities during the many patent infringement lawsuits waged against him. As a global legend, Edison's legal difficulties not only made for juicy headlines, they were horrendously expensive and pulled precious dollars from Edison's innovation coffers.
First, Edison used his 3 success thinking steps in refusing to be sucked in by the sensationalist hype being thrown at him, and realizing that others were facing even more dire circumstances than he. Second, he knew these lawsuits were temporary. Other than appearing in court as needed, Edison never spent time thinking about them. He kept the lawsuits in the courtroom, and stayed focused on his innovation work in the lab. And third, he never let his opponents get under his skin. He kept his usual upbeat, playful routine at home and at work - indulging in a few extra cigars and lots of pie.
Psychologist Dr. Martin Seligman - director of the University of Pennsylvania's Positive Psychology Center and author of Learned Optimism - tells us that by weaving Edison's three qualities into how we talk about our current situation, we can retrain our mind to shift away from the negative and toward the positive.
So for example, when talking about a challenge you're grappling with, begin cultivating your success mindset by describing your "story" as a non-personal challenge that others are facing, too. Describe why it's in your life just as a temporary learning experience, and how you're continually refocusing attention on things that are going well. For more tools on how to "refocus your story," check out positivity author Jon Gordon's amazing new book The No Complaining Rule.
2) Develop a Solution-orientation By Imagining a Future State
When Edison faced an obstacle, he would spend no energy on it at all unless he felt it worthy of his time. His deafness, for example, didn't make the grade. Being partially deaf didn't vex Edison. Instead, he viewed it as a blessing that allowed him to concentrate more fully on his work. So he never tried to "solve" his deafness.
Edison used his laboratory as a place to cultivate a solution-orientation in himself as well as his employees. Key to being solution-oriented was his ability to imagine a future state in which the difficulty at hand is fully resolved. Edison would actually vault ahead of the problem and place his mind into the future solution state. Then he'd work "backward" from the solution to the problem. Edison said, "When I have fully decided that a result is worth getting, I go ahead of it and make trial after trial until it comes." He taught his employees to do the same.
For example, Edison's invention of the incandescent electric light was driven by a fundamental insight that incandescence could be created by combining a small radiating surface with a high-resistance current - the exact inverse of how electricity was believed to behave at that time. Because he focused on solutions that combined these two seemingly incompatible factors, he "solved" incandescence after 20 teams of scientists had failed to do so.
Rather than brute-forcing solutions to a challenge by approaching it from a present-time orientation, take a page from Edison's notebook by moving your mind forward in time to an imaginary time when a solution does exist. Then, work backward toward the problem. This approach not only enabled Edison to develop a robust set of options, it allowed him to outpace all his competitors.
3) There's No Such Thing as Failure, Only Learning
Edison defied failure. To him, failure was not a real outcome; all his results he viewed as learning. For example, in 1900 Edison conducted nearly 10,000 experiments in one year as he sought to create the world's first alkaline storage battery. In response to a co-worker's question about why he continued to pursue this elusive invention after getting no results, Edison replied, "Results? Why man, I've gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won't work."
Just a few years earlier, Edison had faced near-bankruptcy after pursuing iron ore milling in the late 1890's for nearly a decade - an era in his career known as "Edison's Folly." Major newspapers branded Edison "a back number" who was washed up and past his prime.
But Edison didn't let these "no hope" scenarios get to him. He knew he could rely on his solution-orientation and success mindset as a way to drive new insights...no matter what other people said.
Edison's storage battery, first launched in 1905 and then improved in 1910, became one of his most profitable inventions. Edison's battery completely transformed the electrical power industry - some 20 years after he had created the industry itself - by offering the world's first portable power source.
Never let anyone say you're a failure...and never buy your own internal mental chatter that leads you down that path. For a daily reminder of what it takes to defy failure, go to The Napoleon Hill Society website at www.naphill.org and sign up for their daily inspirational messages. I love them - and many include references to Edison!
4) Edison's Life Purpose Was to Innovate for the Betterment of Humanity
In mid-September Hurricane Ike devastated the Texas coastline, forcing the evacuation of hundreds of people from their homes - and totally obliterating entire neighborhoods. Squalls from Ike blew north to the Midwest. I happened to be watching my college-age son play football that weekend in Indianapolis. As it turned out, while watching the game my basement in Chicago was flooding from the storms!
When I got the alert from a neighbor at about 6 PM, I drove home in torrential rains and made the normally 2-hour drive in about 4 hours. Greeted by soaking carpet in my basement and about 2 inches of water, I began despairing.
Then I remembered that Edison almost went bankrupt in his 60's after a December fire ravaged 13 of his manufacturing buildings on the West Orange Laboratory campus. In addition to finished goods and Christmas Holiday orders, irreplaceable historical records were lost to the flames, including priceless voice recordings of Edison and Russian author Leo Tolstoy, among other famous notables of the day. All of his savings were nearly depleted in rebuilding after the fire.
But Edison remained undaunted by the $7 million that he lost that night. Deep down, he knew he could ultimately rebuild the factories. He knew he could either get a bank loan, or he could sell patents to raise cash.
He also knew, in the end, it wasn't really the factories that mattered. What mattered was that he was doing the work he was meant to do. What mattered was that he was inventing and innovating every day, just as he was gifted to do. He said, "My philosophy of life is work - bringing out the secrets of nature and applying them for the happiness of man. I know of no better service to render during the short time we are in this world."
And here I was worried about 2" of water in my basement...
Edison understood that continuing to live his life purpose was the most powerful thing he could do in the face of any disaster.
Do you know your life purpose? You may not believe it's related to your innovation power, but it's critical to be able to tap into this source in face of a calamity, and keep going. This is what every master innovator can do. Can you?
In The Next Issue: How Thomas Edison Created the Future
|
