By We were in London last night, and on the way back home this morning I was listening to BBC Radio 4. I would have been talking to Holly, but she was asleep on the back seat, and Max isn’t yet able to have a fluent conversation 🙂
There was an interview with two authors who were talking about how important it is to play, something I’ve written about before.
They’d analysed the luxuries people have created and enjoyed through the centuries, how they’ve come about and what they caused, both good and bad.
But they were also talking about how the most creative things happen when you aren’t planning them to, or when you make a mistake.
Here are just a few world changing things that were made by mistake:
- Penicillin. This was invented when Sir Alexander Fleming threw away his experiments and then discovered mould growing in a petri dish.
- Chocolate Chip Cookies. Invented by Ruth Wakefield when she realised she was out of bakers chocolate for her cookies and decided to crumble broken sweet chocolate into the dough expecting them to melt. Instead they stuck in it and the chocolate chip cookie was invented.
- Crisps (Potato Chips). George Crum, a chef at the Carey Moon Lakehouse, got annoyed when a customer kept sending back his potatoes asking for them to be more fried and thinner, he sliced them insanely thin and fried them rock hard. He was surprised when the customer loved them and asked for more.
- Cornflakes. The Kellogg Brothers accidentally left a pot of boiled grain on the stove for a number of days, what emerged was thick, dry and mouldy. Removing the mould left them with what became Cornflakes.
- Inkjet Printers. A Canon engineer accidentally left his pen on a hot iron, a few minutes later the ink ejected from it.
And the list goes on and on and on and on.
The moral of the story… don’t try too hard to find that one amazing idea. Just do something that’s going to help somebody, and then keep doing things.
You will make mistakes, and the more mistakes you make, the more likely you are to become super creative and discover something incredible.
Michael
P.S. The thang is… you can still make money while you make mistakes. What I teach in Business Ignition gives you the foundations and building bricks you need to build an online empire. You can use it in any market, for online or offline products.
Quite simply, it gives you a way to make an income while you practice how to make mistakes.
What do you think?