The Irony of Percieved Success

This is a picture of one of the world's most popular inventors. He pretty much laid the foundation for everything that is anything in the world. He created the first practical light-bulb and held over 1093 patents (excluding those registered in Europe).

Yet, on record he spent more than half his life failing at almost everything he touched.

There are two types of failures, those that plan to fail and those that attempt, but fail... Thomas Edison was the latter.

I read about him, and found two fundamental things that made him who we remember:

Fact 1

He was partially deaf by the age of 12 (he couldn't hear sentences, but picked up sound).

In America, 12 years old kids are in middle school, where they are introduced to lab reports (the cycle of Experiment, Fail, and Report). That's pretty much what he did for the rest of his life.

Fact 2

Thomas Edison had some disastrous failures that made him the laughing stock of the world.

The first was "Concrete Furniture" which was too heavy to lift; The second was a supposed "Talking Doll" that only screamed, scaring children. Though he could barely hear the world laughing, he hung the newspaper cartoon images making a fool of him on his office walls.

In the society we live in, we tend to be scared of experimenting, so we fail before we even start.

We live in a world where planning to fail is regarded as success, and attempting but failing is regarded as failure (rather than a successful attempt).

The first lesson I learnt: In order to be successful, you have to be prepared to fail.

THE END

After writing this, I thought about the definition of success and concluded that success is what you make it. That means what wrote is wrong in a few ways.

Lesson Two: Always think Critically