You Don't Have To Be Brilliant In Order ToSucceed Greatly

“You don’t have to be brilliant to have brilliant ideas and outcomes”

At the age of nineteen, a Russian, Igor Sikorsky, almost had a working model of the first helicopter. By the age of forty-nine in 1940, Sikorsky’s successful VS-300 became a model that others based theirs on, and Sikorsky was considered the father of the helicopter.
At the age of thirty-seven, Mary Anderson had the first patent for a windshield wiper. Her goal was to clean snow, rain, and dirt off car windshields years before Henry Ford’s Model T automobiles were in production. On a visit to New York City in 1902, Anderson got the
windshield-wiper idea while on a trolley car whose front window could not be kept closed because sleet made it impossible to see through it.

In 1829, at the age of thirty-seven, William Austin Burt invented the typographer, the predecessor to the typewriter. He worked at that time in the Michigan territorial legislature and later became a county Circuit Court Judge.

A fifteen-year-old grammar-school dropout from Maine invented an important and useful item. In 1873, while he was ice-skating with a new pair of skates, Chester Greenwood’s ears were very cold. He went home and asked his grandmother to sew some fur onto wire shaped in the form of ears and attached to a metal band. Thus, the first set of earmuffs! The rest is history. Greenwood would ultimately establish a factory and produce earmuffs of a style still in use today.

Was Chester the most book-smart child of his day? No. But Chester was driven to greatness by dissatisfaction. He was dissatisfied by his present situation and was motivated to the action of changing it for the better. Initially, Chester probably had no intention of becoming an inventor whom the world would notice and recognize for something quite useful. Chester merely wanted to keep his ears from freezing.

Many other people before 1873 had freezing ears, but they did not have the foresight and drive to work at the problem without stopping until they fixed it.

We each have the ability to excel. We can be great, and we can each be driven to fix a problem, right a wrong, or invent the seemingly impossible invention. Our mind can handle anything that is requested of it. But do we want something so badly that we will not stop until its completion?

Will we be driven so intensely that we think about it endlessly?

Let’s each learn to develop that powerful drive, that positive mental attitude needed to succeed.

Do you want it badly enough? Because, you know, you have wanted something badly enough in your past that you refused to give in until you achieved success. It’s all in the programming
of that inner mind, that subconscious mind, that works magic whenever it is impressed strongly enough by the importance of a special goal.

Is There Gold at the Foot of the Rainbow?
I didn’t know enough to quit. I was a dreamer who believed in the gold
at the foot of the rainbow. I dared to go where wise ones feared to tread.
—King Camp Gillette (1855-1932), Inventor

The gold at the foot of the rainbow—what a great analogy. The great inventors and highly successful have the ability to focus on the gold at the foot of the rainbow. They have vision. They have fortitude. They keep their minds focused on the finish line, not on all the obstacles
they encounter along the long, winding, and bumpy road to that finish line. The bumps and failures don’t even faze the tremendously driven person. The failure is almost welcomed because the successful thinker knows in his heart that he will achieve success—it is only a matter
of time.

So, throw whatever distractions and obstacles you can at me, because I will prevail.

C- 2011 John Paul Carinci from the book: An All Consuming Desire To Succeed