By Shaun Ng
When Thomas Edison was laughed at by his contemporaries for failing so many times, he did not give up.
In fact, when he was young, his teacher told him that he was too stupid to learn anything. Despite still ringing in his ears, those hurting words, “You are a slow learner!” did not deter him from being persistent.
The great scientist and inventor in America, as we know him today, later came out with this one secret in his life. “Success,” he said, “is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration?”
Indeed, when he first started his career at the age of 13 years, Edison began his career by selling candy, newspaper, and vegetables, earning only US$ 50 every week. He used some of his earnings to buy equipment for his electrical and chemical experiments.
At the time, Joseph Swan had developed an incandescent light bulb. However, Edison realized that Swan’s design had a problem with the filament. So he decided to make it work. Using different kinds of materials, he tried and he failed many times.
Someone said that it was Edison’s 1,000th time that he finally found the correct material to use as a filament for his light bulb! With this, he successfully invented the light bulb!
Put it in another way, “Great success is built on failure, frustration, even catastrophe.” This is a maxim in life that we see even in the lives of other well-known people of modern times, including Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft Corporation.
Gates, who is one of the best software developers in the world, was actually inspired by the work of Andrew Carnegie and John D, but had he not worked hard to develop a new software for the computer, the world would not have taken a great leap forward in Internet Communication Technology (ICT).
In fact, when I was young, I used to make paper shields with weird things on them which eventually failed because I had no knowledge of how to do it. I asked my parents and searched online for tutorials to improve my shield. I tried many times and failed to get the result I wanted. That is why it will always take inspiration first, but after that, it will take a lot of hard work and perspiration before I finally found a way to make a shield that was strong enough.
We have to keep on trying many times, even going through hard times, to become someone successful on our own, instead of waiting to be spoon fed by others.
I am inspired by the words of someone who described Edison in these words: "Just because something didn’t do what he planned it to do does not mean that it is useless."
Because Edison wanted to show to everyone that he was not just a stupid and lazy child, he soon became the smartest man and the one and only America greatest inventor!
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