Potential
There is potential in all of us. Seeing the potential in someone, something or even in ourselves is not always easy to do. Sometimes its hidden from view and out of our grasp or our ability to understand it and othertimes it can be very obvious. Everyone has potential value and knowing what to look for is the key to revealing it. Just think about this. If Thomas Edison hadn't tried just one more time to invent the light bulb, we might all still be in the "dark ages". The following story is an example of a dogs owner failing to recognize obvious potential.
A guy is driving around and he sees a sign in front of a house: “Talking Dog for Sale.”He rings the bell, and the owner tells him the dog is in the backyard. The guy goes into the backyard and sees a Labrador retriever sitting there.“You talk?” he asks. “Yep,” the lab replies. “So, what’s your story?”The dog looks up and says, “Well, I discovered that I could talk when I was pretty young. I wanted to help the government, so I told the CIA about my gift, and in no time at all they had me jetting from country to country, sitting in rooms with spies and world leaders, because no one figured a dog would be eavesdropping. I was one of their most valuable spies for eight years running.“But the jetting around really tired me out, and I knew I wasn’t getting any younger, so I wanted to settle down. I signed up for a job at the airport to do some undercover security work, mostly wandering near suspicious characters and listening in. I uncovered some incredible dealings and was awarded a batch of medals. I got married, had a mess of puppies, and now I’m just retired.”
The guy is amazed. He goes back inside and asks the owner what he wants for the dog. “Ten dollars.”
The guy says, “This dog is amazing. Why on earth are you selling him so cheap?”“Because he’s a liar. He didn’t do any of that stuff!”
Pop
posted by Anonymous @ 9:52 AM
8 Comments
8 Comments:
Wow Pop,that whole Thomas Edison analogy is deep. haha just kidding
that story is really cute and funny thanks for posting it I needed a good laugh today
julia
Glad you liked it :)
Pop
That is a good story and a good point. I did some reading on Thomas Edison after you posted this and found out that he actually didn't invent the light bulb. In fact he purchased the light bulb patent from another inventor. The problem was that the light didn't last long enough to be practical. I guess you could say he is famous today becauses he saw the "potential" in someone else's invention.
Who was the other inventor?
Pop
I guess there were a few of them but some designs worked a lot better than others.
Here's an excerpt from the article I was referring to in Wikipedia:
On July 24, 1874 a Canadian patent was filed for the Woodward and Evans Light by a Toronto medical electrician named Henry Woodward and a colleague Mathew Evans. They built their lamps with different sizes and shapes of carbon filaments held between electrodes in glass globes filled with nitrogen. Woodward and Evans attempted to commercialize their bulb, but were unsuccessful. Nonetheless, Thomas Edison considered their approach sufficiently promising that he bought the rights to both their Canadian and US patents before embarking on his own light bulb development program.
Thanks Luke, have you ever noticed that the more we learn about something it only seems to make us realize how much we don't know.
Franjo Hanaman (Franjo Hannaman) (1878–1941) was a Croatian inventor, engineer, and chemist, who gained world recognition for inventing the world's first applied electric light-bulb with a metal filament (tungsten) with his assistant Aleksandar Just, independently of his contemporaries.
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This is also from Wicipedia, but makes no mention of patent information. Probably because he wasn't in the US.
Pop
I have noticed that. I've heard it explained that the reason for that is because knowledge always comes to us in bunches. We can't know just one thing - we can only know one thing in relation to another and that in relation to another and so on. Our knowledge of the world is a network or web of interconnected ideas. So that as we begin to examine the particular web that is the substance of one idea it becomes more and more evident just how integrated that web is with larger surrounding webs. The BBC ran a story last month titled something like the more you focus the less you see. It was about the human eye but it seemed to also apply to focusing the mind and I read one article that made that application. Knowing about something seems to involve both looking closely at it for a while and then backing up and looking at the big picture too.
A little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing
While focusing on one small aspect of a thing, you can be totally oblivious to the possible dangers associated with it. When we back up and try to drink in the big picture as you mentioned, we run the risk of missing something in the details that could manifest itself unexpectedly and present its own inherent set of consequences.
Hey, be careful out there! :)
Pop
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