Who is the father of invention?

For last two years, I have become very passionate about reading. Self help, motivation, management, leadership, entrepreneurship, spirituality, biographies, I am reading as much as I can. Subbu, my boss at Hitachi Data Systems, a great friend and mentor always used to tell me “Someone has written his 30 years of experience in 300 pages and if you don’t have time to read 30 pages of that wisdom in a week, you are doing a crime.” It was very difficult initially to develop this habit but now I realize how true his words are.

Sometimes, even a great amount of time spent on thinking, introspecting and reflecting on hindsight doesn’t necessarily provide useful inference but a single sentence in a book provides the desired clarity in a flash. That Aha thought, that eureka moment, awesome!!!

I have recently started a venture and one day during introspection I wanted to relive the entire episode in my mind, verbatim. The first moment when the business idea came to mind, what prompted it, how it became a passion so strong that I left a quite comfortable job and eventually started a small venture “RISAN”, dreaming to be the next Wipro.

I found the answer in two beautiful books: "Winner’s wisdom to succeed" by Jim Stovall, where he narrates the story of an ice cream vendor at the world’s fair a century ago. He had such a great demand from customers that he ran out of spoons and bowls. Next to him was a waffle vendor, who laughed at him for being ill prepared.

Out of frustration and desperation, the flash of genius came. He bought all the waffles formed them into what we now know as ice- cream cones and rest as we all know is history.

The ice cream cone would have made this gentleman a millionaire but what really inspired his genius was not only necessity but also the desperation. If necessity is the mother of invention then desperation must certainly be its father.

There’s another amazing book called “Blink” by Malcolm Gladwell. On page number 122, he describes an incident about the fire department commander who enters a house where the kitchen was on fire. When he and his team try and douse the fire with water it doesn’t abate, in a split second the commander says “Let’s get out, now”. Moments after they get out, the floor on which they were standing collapsed. The fire, it turned out, had been in basement.

It was a split second decision and when he was later interviewed, he couldn’t describe how he got the intuition. He said that he just felt something was wrong.

But later the interviewer forced him to think and the commander came up with “The fire didn’t behave the way it was supposed to; kitchen fire should respond to water, it didn’t. It was extraordinarily hot for a kitchen fire, it was a quite fire and normally kitchen fires are noisy”.

Now, all these reasons he could gather only in retrospect. At that moment, he didn’t think about all this and he didn’t have time to think, he just felt that something was wrong and this feeling saved his and his team’s life. But, all this reasoning and logic was there somewhere in the subconscious and it helped in that intuition, that gut feeling.

Amazing stuff!!!

When I read such books and relate these to my own experiences, I feel mesmerized.

So many times, we think that we took a smart decision and pat ourselves for our thinking brilliance, completely forgetting that the experience of every moment lived on this earth, something gained from every person we met/ spoke/ saw or read in a book or watched in TV/ movies, a necessity, a desperation, a dream, a passion, everything has contributed to that decision.

Life is so full of opportunities to learn something new; one just has to have an open mind. As an old saying goes “Power is not in giving, power is in receiving”