Conceive, Believe, and Achieve

Notice how the airplane looks like a bird. Man observed,

conceived, believed, and then achieved flying according to

the same principles by which birds fly.

The first television set came out in the 1940’s. If I told

people in 1940 that I was going to invent a one-inch by oneinch

color television, they would have laughed behind my back, calling me

color television set now exists. And not only that, you can

now have your color video telephone to go along with your

miniature color television.

I’ve become aware how miniaturized everything has

become. Our western culture has become a culture of

miniaturized, technological devices. Inventors, scientists,

and researchers have used their creative imagination to find

ways to put volumes of books on a CD, to scan billions of

bits of information in less than a second, and to incorporate

whole libraries of books into small memory boards.

Researchers, applying their creative imagination, are trying

to develop future computers that use atoms for storing

information, not just chips. These new inventions will lead

to further miniaturizing computers, cameras, telephones,

and all kinds of electronic and communication products.

You can certainly see that technology keeps changing

and improving. If you don’t start working on your creative

ideas now, someone else may have the persistence to

accomplish what you wanted to accomplish.

Thank God there are individuals who have the vision,

determination, and drive to forge ahead through failure

after failure. You may only have the mental picture of a

given idea or invention, but that mental picture can be

the biggest fool on earth. That miniature

enough to keep you working on your idea. Thousands of

new inventions are being patented every day. When will

people see the completion of your idea?

Imagine somewhere that there should be a monument

to lost ideas. It’s not a junk heap. It’s the should-have-been

heap. It’s a pile of the best ideas that were never tried or

fulfilled. It’s the unfulfilled patents or never-written books

or never-created ideas because somebody was afraid to try

or somebody ridiculed the idea to death. Is that where you

want your ideas to end up?

Look at Henry Ford, who in his early years began

working on inventing a gas-driven engine. Ford had a study

done by a leading college to see if the gas engine could

be invented. After extensive study, the college’s technical

department determined that the idea could not be done.

A piston could not be made to move by gasoline-ignited

power.

Henry Ford still believed he could build such an engine.

He purchased his own parts and with help from his wife, he

got the first makeshift piston powered by droplets of gasoline

ignited by a spark. The rest is history. The horses and the

steam engines of the day were gradually replaced with the

internal combustion engine in the early 1900s. Henry Ford

then developed the first successful automobile assembly

line, building cars faster than anyone had imagined. A

man with vision, determination, and fortitude, Henry Ford

proved himself a true visionary who would not let his ideas

be extinguished by the negativity and ridicule of others.
C-2005 John P. Carinci from the book The Power Of Being Different