“Each of us has the ability to do the seemingly impossible”

“Each of us has the ability to do the seemingly impossible”

“Believe and act as if it were impossible to fail”.

—Charles F. Kettering 1876-1958, Inventor of the electric starter

“You don’t have to be brilliant to have brilliant ideas and outcomes.

At the age of nineteen, a Russian, Igor Sikorsky, almost had a

working model of the first helicopter. By the age of forty-nine in 1940,

Sikorsky’s successful VS-300 became a model that others based theirs

on, and Sikorsky was considered the father of the helicopter.

At the age of thirty-seven, Mary Anderson had the first patent for

a windshield wiper. Her goal was to clean snow, rain, and dirt off car

windshields years before Henry Ford’s Model T automobiles were in

production. On a visit to New York City in 1902, Anderson got the

windshield-wiper idea while on a trolley car whose front window could

not be kept closed because sleet made it impossible to see through it.

In 1829, at the age of thirty-seven, William Austin Burt invented

the typographer, the predecessor to the typewriter. He worked at that

time in the Michigan territorial legislature and later became a county

Circuit Court Judge.

A fifteen-year-old grammar-school dropout from Maine invented

an important and useful item. In 1873, while he was ice-skating with a

new pair of skates, Chester Greenwood’s ears were very cold. He went

home and asked his grandmother to sew some fur onto wire shaped

in the form of ears and attached to a metal band. Thus, the first set of

earmuffs! The rest is history. Greenwood would ultimately establish a

factory and produce earmuffs of a style still in use today.

Was Chester the most book-smart child of his day? No. But Chester

was driven to greatness by dissatisfaction. He was dissatisfied by his

present situation and was motivated to the action of changing it for

the better. Initially, Chester probably had no intention of becoming an

inventor whom the world would notice and recognize for something

quite useful. Chester merely wanted to keep his ears from freezing.

Many other people before 1873 had freezing ears, but they did not have

the foresight and drive to work at the problem without stopping until

they fixed it.

We each have the ability to excel. We can be great, and we

can each be driven to fix a problem, right a wrong, or invent the

seemingly impossible invention. Our mind can handle anything that

is requested of it. But do we want something so badly that we will

not stop until its completion? Will we be driven so intensely that we

think about it endlessly?

Let’s each learn to develop that powerful drive, that positive mental

attitude needed to succeed. Do you want it badly enough? Because, you

know, you have wanted something badly enough in your past that you

refused to give in until you achieved success. It’s all in the programming

of that inner mind, that subconscious mind, that works magic whenever

it is impressed strongly enough by the importance of a special goal.