Ideas That Didn't Make the Cut

Not all ideas are good ones. Ask my kids, for example, about jelly bean pancakes. They weren't very good. But the point is, I tried them. Not all ideas are good ones. It turns out, you can't make artificial snow with a power washer (at least I wasn't able to). You can't fly a kite indoors with a fan (the air stream is too narrow; the kite likes to wander from side-to-side and slips right out of the breeze, falling to the floor). You can't use crayons to fill nail holes in wood, even though they come in many shades of brown and are a wax, like the nail-filling pencils you buy at the hardware store - crayons are too hard and brittle.

These are just a few of my ideas that were duds. My boy-hood hero was Thomas Edison. He didn't invent the light bulb, but figured out how to make it practical. After he had tried 700 times to come up with a filament material that lasted a reasonable amount of time, a New York Times reporter asked him, “How does it feel to have failed seven hundred times?” He responded, “I have not failed seven hundred times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those seven hundred ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.” *

There is no failure in trying something that doesn't work, as long as you learn something. So, I'll keep thinking and trying my ideas. Give it a try. And please post a comment about some of your ideas.

* http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/747226.html