You never know where the next really great idea will come from. It might even come from you or me! On second thought, it probably won’t come from me since my brain is incapable of two thought trains at once and the Christmas Express is occupying my thoughts right now. If you could look inside my mind…though I’m really not sure anyone would want to…it’d be covered with candy canes, snowmen, lights (blinking, of course), gift wrap, and cookies.
So, yeah, if anyone’s going to wax brilliant, it’ll have to be you. Check back with me sometime in January.
In between baking, decorating, wrapping, and shopping, I’ve been reading a lot about inventions and life-changing ideas lately. I enjoy spending time learning about people who think (or thought) outside of the box. There’s nothing quite as exciting as the human mind at work - not even a sale at JCPenney. Welllll…
The best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of ideas. - Earl Nightingale
- In 1937, Sylan Goldman, owner of two supermarket chains, noticed that customers rarely bought more groceries than they could carry in their arms. So an idea came to him - help the customer, as well as himself, by designing a basket on four wheels. The shopping cart was born and now we can’t even imagine stores without them. That reminds me, I need walnuts.
- Q-tips were invented by Leo Gerstenzang when he watched his wife cleaning their baby’s ears with toothpicks and cotton.
- Ralph Schneider decided to form Diner’s Club one evening after he lost his wallet.
- Ole Evinrude helplessly watched his ice cream melt as he carried it in a rowboat to an island picnic. The frustrating (and messy) event led him to invent the outboard motor.
A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a quip and worried to death by a frown on the right man’s brow. - Charles Brower
I’ve saved my favorite master of ideas for last. What makes George Washington Carver so remarkable is the fact that, as a black man living in the late 1800s and early 1900s - he probably saw more yawns than a bedtime story. But he never let doubters or their sneers or snips get in the way. Thankfully, he just kept on keeping on. As a result, we have the adhesives, axle grease, bleach, buttermilk, chili sauce, fuel briquettes, ink, instant coffee, linoleum, mayonnaise, meat tenderizer, metal polish, paper, plastic, pavement, shaving cream, shoe polish, synthetic rubber, talcum powder, wood stain, and peanut butter that we know and love today.
Mr. Carver also developed a crop rotation method that blew the lid off of southern agriculture. He, singlehandedly, changed the south from being a one-crop land (cotton) to a multi-crop powerhouse.
Most remarkably, he didn’t profit from his inventions. To continue his research, he even turned away from a $100,000 a year salary. That’s almost a million dollars today!
About his ideas, George Washington Carver said, “God gave them to me. How can I sell them to someone else?”
An idea not coupled with action will never get any bigger than the brain cell it occupied. - Arnold H. Glasgow
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