The life of Edison inspires and illuminates.

A member of the horsesmouth team, someone focused on finding ways we can help you succeed, sent me the following about the world's most successful inventor, Thomas Alva Edison:

• Edison worked incessantly, often for 20 hours a day. Believe it or not, throughout history, this is the key ingredient found in the most consistently successful individuals.
• Edison found his schooling utterly "repulsive." Everything was forced on him. He found it impossible to observe and learn the processes of nature simply by description, or to comprehend the alphabet and arithmetic just by rote. To Edison, it was always necessary to discover with his own eyes—to "do things" or "make things" himself—in order to learn. Edison said that to see for himself, to test things himself "for one instant, was better than learning about something I had never seen for two hours. . . " What Edison realized is that to really learn something, people need hands-on experience. They need to be able to build knowledge for themselves.
• Edison clearly sensed that invention and discovery depend on the total accumulation of knowledge, including information that temporarily gets forgotten. He was forever collecting curious and miscellaneous facts and squirreling them away in his memory. Edison stressed the important role chance, or accident, plays in discovery. In other words, he found no fact too trivial, no piece of information too irrelevant, no idea too outlandish. It's as if he were perpetually conducting a brainstorming session with himself.
• Edison wrote the book on perseverance, saying, "The trouble with other inventors is that they try a few things and quit. I never quit until I get what I want!" Edison knew the value of learning from his mistakes. To find the right material for the filament of the light bulb, he went through countless materials almost randomly until he found one that worked.

Edison said that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Well, I'm inspired. Now for the hard work. It's clear to me that, although I'm no Edison, my successes have come from applying myself as he did. And my failures have come from insufficient energy, focus, curiosity, and perseverance—the characteristics Edison displayed in abundance. When we care enough about success, we win. When we don't care enough, we lose. And those we serve lose as well.