Think about it for a moment: how many concrete examples can you come up with?
Together with Steve Wozniak (see photo, left) and Ron Wayne, Steve Jobs founded Apple in 1976, first to realize the idea of a home computer and later many further developments. Back then, computers were so big that nobody could imagine the idea of owning your own computer at home would ever become reality.
We also wouldn’t be sitting in an airplane today, flying around the world in a few hours, if there hadn’t been people who believed in flight. For a long time, they were dismissed as cranks. But then, at the end of the 19th century, Otto Lilienthal succeeded in lifting himself into the air with a flying device.
The longer we think about it, the more examples come to mind.
And you may well have had ideas yourself that the people around you didn’t take seriously. But even without pushback from outside, we often tend to dismiss new ideas right away, because in the very next moment we’re already thinking about why this or that isn’t possible. Instead, we should ask ourselves far more often what we really want, and only afterward worry about how to make it happen.
Think about whether you’ve had ideas in the past that you may have pushed aside too soon. It might be worth picking up one or another of those ideas again and pursuing it further.
And if you’re currently working on something that seems far-fetched to others, don’t let yourself get discouraged right away. Stick with your idea and keep looking for ways to make it happen.
Remember: Edison didn’t fail. He just “found 10,000 ways that don’t work.” (Thomas Alva Edison)
© Image: Dr. Yasemin Yazan & Steve Wozniak
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