Thomas.A.Edison
One of the most respected scientist to ever grace the Earth. His ideas tilted minds towards a more advanced future, his research produced the cornerstones of Physics, paving the way for the next generation of bright minds. We know of his contributions, we read them as text. However, his values of life that made him the scientist he was should not be overlooked. Lessons can really be learnt.
Not just from him too. Many more predominant people who left their mark on Earth, who have gone through life’s zenith and nadir, and in the end left messages of vast experience waiting for new-borns to accidentally discover.
Thomas.A.Edison depicted a fervent peserverance that resulted in his success. His values can be seen in his quotes:
“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realise how close they were to success when they gave up.”
He lived his words. The invention of the filament changed humanities lifestyle and will continue to be an integrated part of today’s multifarious infrastructures (lights). Behind this inventions were 10000 materials considered, expermented, proven that could not work, the one after the 10000th made history. Picture yourself in his shoes for a second: your now at the 1000th try to find an object that can emit light by electricity. Low and behold! It fails again. After 1000 tries, would you choose to continue with the experiment? As if the endogenous prompting isn’t enough, the rest of your fellow scentists belittle your attempts, stating the obvious.
“Come on now, its virtually impossible! Look at all the things you have used! Even your own hair was set on fire! You tried everything, you have given it your best shot. Let’s just conclude that it not possible ok? Don’t be too sad though.”
“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realise how close they were to success when they gave up.”
“Reeeeaaally? Thomas, come on. You HAVE tried what seems like the googolplex time. What have you got? NOTHING!”
“Just because something doesn’t do what you planned it to do doesn’t mean its USELESS.”
Respect to you Edison. His almost fanatical devotion to a vision to allow people the ability to continue to do things at night gave birth to what in my opinion is the greatest invention ever. I can only guess wthat his movition was: His vision of people using his invention to improve their standard of living outweighed the justifications of giving up.
But is that all? How do you live with so much failures? He failed like 10000 times! Was he not down? Depressed? What gave him strength to continue? One of the things he said portrayed a man with much more than perseverance we must learn from.
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10000 ways that won’t work.”
He was right. But this is not the point. The core of the sentence stem from the way he went about his experiments. With optimism. With the anticipation that everything he has culminated would be a small step towards his vision. We deem each of his experiments as piddling. However, while we are looking at his experiments to gauge its value, he was looking forward to his vision to gauge its value, picking up everything he could along the way to ensure his vision becomes the reality that is today.
I ask of us to look at our lives now, what our ultimate passion and dream is. Is it worthwhile for me to be doing, even sacrficing certain things to accomplish that passion? If your dreams and pssion do not justify your actions, the work you put in would really be tedious, strenuous. Commitment must be accompanied by drive. Simply put, a person aiming for an A in Chemistry but hates it to the core, with the mindset of finally burning his syllabus after A levels will definitely have a hard time grinding out results compared to one who may seem extreme in uncovering every fundamentalism of chemistry, ON THE WAY picking up an A for the same test.
On a wider scale, a person wanting to create an economic policy that would herald unprecedented change to how the economies of the world function would have a much worthwhile time picking up theories on the way, knowing it will ultimately allow him to have the capacity to reach his goal. This compared to a guy taking economist because its will ensure he earns lots of money? Seems to speak for itself. The difference? How much more it benefits in satisfying not just the passion that is instilled in you, but the people around you. At least in my opinion 
