Where do great ideas come from? Great ideas come from innovation. Innovation is the application of better ideas to make changes to the world. Did Edison just think of the light bulb while sitting in the bathtub? Edison changed the world by something that can make light with electricity. Why can’t everyone be as innovative as Edison or Einstein?

I can answer that question. You can’t just think of a world changing idea or invention without a few steps. These steps helped Einstein and Leonardo da Vinci come up with their inventions/ideas that help put the world into motion for the current generation. Learn these steps, maybe you could become as great as Edison.

First, you need to have a little serendipity. Serendipity means you need to have some sort of happy accident. I will give you an example. A guy named Tim Berners Lee was sitting in the bathtub one day. He turned on the water, but he forgets to put the plug in the drain. The water, obviously, drains out. This made him think about all of the network of connecting pipes that go to the sewer. The serendipity is the water draining.

And, the thought process called the slow hunch. For example, Isaac Newton saw an apple fall from a apple tree. He then started to ask himself,” Why did the apple fall?” That question made him question all of the beliefs his time. Often, hunches from one person’s brain often collide with another person’s/people’s hunches Newton’s heliocentric theory went against about everyone who was taught to believe in everything that the church told them to believe.

But, if you think about it, without Newton and the Church, the gravitational theory wouldn’t have been discovered until later in history. Ideas that collide often can relate to each other, and when they come together, both are affected in a positive and a productive way.
It takes a while to innovate something. For example, after the incident with the falling apple, Newton’s idea of gravity didn’t exactly come to him at that very moment. It might’ve taken a year. It may’ve even take 15 or 20 years to have a plausible idea that changes the way the world thinks.

Does everyone have to be innovative? Rather, do we even need innovation for our survival? Innovation makes the world go round. Without the ambition to progress in technology, we would still be in the stone age. If we didn’t have important, innovative events of history, like the Renaissance or the Age of Empire, we wouldn’t be anywhere near where we are today. The human race would still be surviving against mammoths and Bubonic Plague.

“You know what I hate? When kids have filthy rags for clothes, have free lunch at school, and the parents smoke and drink and the kid pulls out an IPhone 5”- Mr. Shankle. Is innovation getting in the way of the world? Rather, is it our fault that we should have the need to have the bigger and better technology?

Innovation might sometimes get to our heads. Too much innovation and the world goes wild with the lust of new technology and we go mad with power. Too little innovation and the world slowly declines with the underusage of technology and the human race dies. We just need a few hundred people who are in charge of innovation, and we will survive and prosper for the next 70 to 80 years.

Innovation gave you all of your current possessions. Your clothes, if they are made of cotton, were made from a machine that Eli Whitney invented 1793. Your 200 dollar shoes were first evolved by early humans in 5000 B.C, and were made out of sheeps skin. The computer that you are reading this essay on was innovated and made popular by Charles Babbage in the 19th century. Innovation gave you everything in the world, not including the Earth itself.