Success Lessons From Legendary Innovators

The growth of human civilization has always been fuelled by extraordinary men and women who dared to push the envelope on what was possible by daring to think the impossible and dream bigger than anyone else had dared. Some of them became rich and famous, others were honored years after their deaths — but all of them have important success lessons to teach us.

Some of these lessons we learn by listening to their words and advice, as given in their interviews, biographies, and sometimes their journals. Yet others can only be gathered by studying their lives and seeing how they lived, and observing their character and habits. In the profiles below, I want to share a sprinkling of both kinds of lessons.

Nikola Tesla: “Be alone, that is the secret of invention.”

Nikola Tesla 1856-1943

Inventor, engineer

“The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind. Be alone — that is the secret of invention: be alone, that is when ideas are born.”

Say the word Tesla today, and chances are that people will think you’re talking about the world’s first viable electric car, the Tesla. But naming his game-changing car the Tesla was Elon Musk’s tribute to one of the world’s most transformational, daring — and forgotten — inventors. Even though the world thinks of Thomas Edison as the man who invented electricity, the current that powers the world is the one that Nikola Tesla invented, competing directly against Edison, his one-time employer.

But one of the greatest lessons we can learn from Tesla is the need for solitude for those who want to be truly creative. He used to say, “Be alone, that is the secret of invention.” When Tesla was alone, his mind used to work in overdrive. One activity in which Tesla found solitude was walking. In the quiet isolation of walking slowly through the park or down the streets, Tesla would often come up with some of his finest ideas.

In 1882, at the age of 26, while working as an electrical engineer with a telephone company in Budapest, Tesla was on a solitary walk when he came up with an idea for a brushless alternating current (AC) motor. Excited, he drew the first sketches of electromagnets that he could see in his mind’s eye, in the sand of the path where he was walking.

Tesla had always been fascinated by electricity. His knowledge and hands-on expertise increased when he got work at repairing direct current (DC) power plants with the Continental Edison Company in Paris. His talent did not go unnoticed. Two years later, in 1884, he was on a ship bound for the USA, to work with Edison’s company there. He was only 28.

Edison had invented electricity, but had no clear idea how to get it from house to house. His product was a Direct Current (DC), a unidirectional current that traveled at a low voltage and petered out after a mile or so. Edison’s solution was to have substations every mile or so. But Tesla was a far more original thinker than Edison. Sent to repair Edison’s tragic DC generators, he invented AC, a bi-directional current that could move at high voltage and no loss for long distances. This was a current that could power the world.

Tesla broke with Edison early after several unpaid bonuses, unhappy with Edison’s greediness and dishonesty, and teamed up instead with George Westinghouse, an inventor himself. Together they, and not Edison, won the contract to light up the World Exposition in Chicago in 1893. The world was illuminated with Tesla’s Alternating Current at the flick of a switch.

Tesla believed in intense visualisation. His ideas always took shape inside his head. So vivid was his imagination that he seldom drew schematics on paper. He describes it in his autobiography like this:

“When I get an idea I start at once building it up in my imagination. I change the construction, make improvements and operate the device in my mind. It is absolutely immaterial to me whether I run my turbine in thought or test it in my shop. I even note if it is out of balance. There is no difference whatever, the results are the same. . . When I put it into shape. . . Invariably my device works as I conceived that it should, and the experiment comes out exactly as I planned it. In twenty years there has not been a single exception.”

During his lifetime, Tesla made several predictions that have all come true, from WiFi, artificial intelligence, robots and autonomous cars, wireless power transmission and smartphones. When asked to think of a power source that could generate enough electricity to light up entire cities and counties, Tesla audaciously suggested the force of the falling water at the Niagara Falls — open the human mind to the notion of hydroelectric power.

Tesla was a lifelong believer in the power of vibrations. He believed instinctively that everything in the universe vibrated at different frequencies at their most fundamental level. He understood that all matter was energy given shape and that energy came from the vibrations of atoms and even smaller particles. Thoughts and words, coming out of vibrations themselves, could interact with and influence these other vibrations.

““If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration,” he was fond of saying.

From Tesla, we learn about the power that is released when you think for yourself, following your own star, and the immense creativity of the unfettered mind. Tesla was a truly original thinker, a man who believed in thinking big, and in following his thoughts and logic wherever they might lead him. The result was over 300 patents, including one for a better form of electricity than Edison was proposing.

In the 1890s Tesla invented electric oscillators, meters, improved lights and the high-voltage transformer known as the Tesla coil. He also experimented with X-rays, gave short-range demonstrations of radio communication two years before Guglielmo Marconi and piloted a radio-controlled boat around a pool in Madison Square Garden. But it was not until after his death that the US Supreme Court voided four of Marconi’s key patents, belatedly acknowledging Tesla’s innovations in radio.

Wright brothers: “It is possible to fly without motors but not without knowledge and skills.”

Wilbur Wright (1867-1912) and Orville Wright (1871-1948)

Inventors

“I wish to avail myself of all that is already known and then, if possible, add my mite to help the future worker who will attain final success.” — Wilbur Wright

We live in a word where we can take flight for granted. We speak familiarly about drones, dreamliners, taxis that can fly above roads, helicopters, gliders and now spacecraft. The two famous brothers who pioneered human flight would be astounded by how far their breakthrough has gone. For them, their first flight was a brief victory coming at the end of a string of false starts and failures. If there is one lesson we can learn from the Wright brothers, it is the power of persistence, of never surrendering, of chasing victory against impossible odds until success is yours.

While persistence and utter conviction had a lot to do with their eventual breakthrough, the brothers believed deeply that one can only make progress if one knows all there is to know about a subject and has the necessary skills. “It is possible to fly without motors,” Wilbur Wright used to say, “but not without knowledge and skills.”

Another deep lesson we can learn from the Wright brothers is to ignore the skeptics. Their first was none other than their own father. When the Wright brothers told their dad about their decision to make a plane, he reportedly said “If God wanted us to fly, he would have made us with wings.”

But the world has a long history of naysayers. When scientists announced their plan to put man on the moon, more than half of Americans thought they were crazy. Indeed there must have been moments during their long quest for manned flight that the brothers may have wondered if the skeptics were right. Were they on a crazy mission?

But that is the other lesson we learn from Wilbur and Orville Wright — never give up, no matter what the odds. They believed in themselves and that was enough for them. They did not allow the naysayers to demoralise them or talk their dreams down to earth or tell them that it couldn’t be done.

When they traveled to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, to test out a new ‘glider’ they had developed, they had already been working on manned flight for several years. Their ‘glider’ featured a pilot lying prone, and used wind to sustain lift. Alas, the tests would fail because of unexpected gusts and other hindrances. Repair the glider took time, too, but the brothers would always be back, ready to try again. They would have analyzed their failure to make changes to their prototype that made it more effective.

Their second glider showed some signs of improvement but faced problems with lift and was nearly impossible to control. By 1902, fuelled by failure after failure and prototypes upon protoypes, they had developed an improved glider with effective controls which could stay aloft for a good length of time.

But of course, this was only a starting point for the brothers. Their goal was to fly a powered airplane. For this they needed an engine, but couldn’t find a suitable one. Their mechanic Charlie Taylor simply invented the world’s first aviation engine.

When the time came, Wilbur won the coin toss but his first attempt didn’t go as planned — after 3.5 seconds in the air, the plane stalled and crashed into the sand, damaging a key component of the aircraft. Three days later, with component repaired, Orville managed 12 seconds of powered flight – 12 seconds that laid the foundation for aviation.

It was not till 1902 and their third attempt, that the glider worked as designed, and they made over 700 successful flights. The following year, with the addition of small motor to the glider, they achieved the first powered flight, lasting 20 seconds and moving 120 feet. On December 17, 1903, they flew this plane three times. The longest flight covered 852 feet and lasted 59 seconds.

Bill Gates: The power of thinking big

Bill Gates 1955–date

Entrepreneur

“The way to be successful in the software world is to come up with breakthrough software, and so whether it’s Microsoft Office or Windows, its pushing that forward. New ideas, surprising the marketplace, so good engineering and good business are one in the same.” — Bill Gates

Bill Gates showed us the meaning of thinking big for the first time in 2007. He had just dropped out of Harvard University because something in an electronics magazine had caught his eye: a little known company called MITS was about to introduce the Altair 8080, a commercial model computer. Reading this, it occurred to the young Gates that the computer world might be about to explode. As a programming genius, the question on Bill Gates mind was” Who would write the software for those computers? Gates wanted to be that person.

But the even bigger question on which he staked his future was: what if there could be a computer on every desktop in the world? Gates wanted his software to be the enabler of a fundamental transformation in the way human beings used computers. Not just in the USA. Not just on his continent. Not just in the developed world or for people who had the money. Gates wanted the whole planet.

That was what thinking big meant to him. He told Altair that he had developed a computer language specifically for use on their computers. Though this was not strictly true, Gates committed himself to developing it by telling them that he already had. The result was a behemoth called Microsoft, and an operating system called DOS.

Decades later, after making Microsoft a legend and becoming one of the wealthiest people in the world, Gates showed us again what thinking big meant when he retired and set up the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation — to rid the whole planet of diseases. His money and passionate commitment have already created new cures and new solutions for a range of diseases from AIDS to TB and malaria.

For a man of such mind-boggling vision and accomplishment, Gates was unexpectedly humble. He frequently spoke of the need for coaches in every life. “Everyone needs a coach,” he once said. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re a basketball player, a tennis player, a gymnast or a bridge player.”

Bill Gates has frequently referred to the billionaire-philanthrope Warren Buffett as his mentor, though when he first met him, he thought of him as just “this guy who picks stocks.” But over many conversations, Gates learnt that Buffett was all about learning to think in different ways.

Buffett, who lives frugally but has donated most of his wealth to charity, was the person who fired up Bill Gates about philanthropy..

Gates says, “It turns out that Warren’s brilliant way of looking at the world is just as useful in attacking poverty and disease as it is in building a business.”

Gates has always valued staying ahead of the curve — having the ability to predict the future and seize the moment before it arrives . His futuristic vision helped him keep Microsoft one-step ahead of the competition at all times. The most classic of these is probably about when he negotiated a deal to license the DOS operating system to IBM for a low $50,000 in 1980. However, sensing that he was on to a big thing, he prudently retained the copyright. As a result, Microsoft was able to license the OS to other vendors who cloned IBM’s machine, thus making a much bigger and more profitable market for his company.

Some other technologies he predicted are –

Price comparison sites

Mobile devices

Instant online payments

Personal assistants

The Internet of things

Online home monitoring

Artificial intelligence and machine learning

Smart advertising

It is well-known that Gates dropped out of Harvard, impatient to get going to realize his grand dreams. However, Gates has always enormously valued learning — continuously and throughout life. He was a strong believer in learning — and learning as early as possible. In 1969, when he was a lad in eighth grade, at a time when computers were corporate machines, his school bought one of early computers. Gates was the first off the mark: excusing from regular math classes, he began learning to program — and loved. His first software was a tic-tac-toe program.

Steve Jobs: “Pure perseverance”

Steve Jobs 1955-2011

Inventor

“I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.” — Steve Jobs

The man who gave the world the Macintosh computer, the iPhone and the iPad was a drifter. His childhood and adolescence and aimless, unruly, lacking direction. But the one quality that made him a giant was his pure perseverance. Jobs just never quit — even when he was sacked from Apple, he didn’t quit. He just went on to start another legendary company. No one seeing Steve Jobs back when he was a backpacker drifting through India looking for bliss and cannabis could have guessed how this one man would one day transform the everyday lives of everyone on the planet with just one of his many inventions — the smartphone.

In an interview, Jobs said he worked really, really hard in his 20s. In later years, he said that perseverance depends on passion and commitment, and is driven by a clear and focussed goal. For him, passion was the engine that put perseverance into overdrive to think up big ideas, solve big problems and make the world a better place.

He also understood that it came at a price — working ceaselessly to make his Apple dream come to life, Jobs neglected many vital areas of life, such as family. It was only in later years that he acquired a deeper appreciation of the value and importance of work-life balance and made time for his personal life.

He understood that changing the world with game-changing ideas was not a one-man job but required a band of brothers. He surrounded himself with other as dedicated to pure perseverance as he was.

We know now from his amazing life, his interviews and his biography that Jobs was anything but a drifter. He was, to the contrary, one of the most focussed and disciplined minds of his generation, able to sense the future, and build technology to meet needs that even the users did not know they had.

Wealth and power were never the rainbows that attracted him. In fact, he lived a minimal life, personally and professionally, cutting out unnecessary decisions where he could. For example, he seldom wore anything other than his trademark blue jeans and black turtleneck. But back when he was a dropout from Reed College, he lived the same way: no dorm room, sleeping on the floors of friends’ rooms, returning empty coke bottles to claim the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, walking 7 miles across town every Sunday to get one good free meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple.

After he dropped out of college courses he had no interest in, he began to drop in to other courses that intrigued him — such as calligraphy. He loved calligraphy and fonts — “It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating,” he said once. He could not have anticipated how that oddball subject would become a theme in his life. The first Macintosh was also the first computer to include a collection of gorgeous types.

Steve Jobs always stayed hungry — never satisfied with where he was, always pushing himself. Sometimes his destiny pushed him. When Apple was at the peak of its success, he was fired by the board of the very company he founded. Something that would have crushed another person rejuvenated Jobs.

“Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick,” says Jobs. “Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it.”

During the next five years, he started a company named NeXT, and another groundbreaking one named Pixar, which created the world’s first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. Apple eventually bought NeXT, Jobs returned to Apple, and the technology he developed at NeXT became the core of Apple’s rebirth and market dominance.

In June 2005, Steve Jobs encapsulated his life message during the commencement address at Harvard with the words, “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.” Staying hungry means never being satisfied and always pushing yourself. Staying foolish means being willing to try things people say cannot be done.

Jobs was legendary also for his profound and instinctive simplicity which permeated every aspect of his professional and personal life. For instance, his wardrobe consisted of jeans and poloneck shirts, usually black. He explained once that it made his life simpler by cutting out one more daily decision.

The same simplicity permeated Apple products. His hired Johny Ives, a man as committed to simplicity as he was, as design director. The result was a clean, uncluttered aesthetic, without not a single color, element or feature that had not absolutely earned its place.

“Simple can be harder than complex,” he said. “You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

Elon Musk: “Teach yourself.”

Elon Musk 1971–today

Inventor

“Frankly, though, I think most people can learn a lot more than they think they can.” — Elon Musk

Is a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania enough for a man to make a rocket that could one day put human beings on Mars? Yet that is precisely what Elon Musk aims to do with his rule-breaking, groundbreaking company Spacex, with which he intends to colonize Mars and — hold your breath — change the planet to make it habitable for humans.

Musk is one of the world’s most awe-inspiring self-learners. Musk is an auto-didact. When he doesn’t know a subject, he teaches himself. He literally read enough books and talked to enough experts until he knew enough — and more than enough — to make rockets that others had said could not be made.

It is hard to believe that the man who in 2019 proved that a re-usable orbital rocket was possible learned all about rockets by reading. The production of a single rocket costs around $60 million but Musk’s reusable rocket Dragon only needs to be built once, at the same price. The cost of gas and replaceable parts between launches is only $200,000.

In the process, Musk once again created an impossibility: produced a heavy rocket with a low price, something that NASA and other space companies could not do. Just a few years before that, as CEP of Tesla, he had showed the world that an all-electric car company could be viable in a high-risk, high-cost industry. Where did he learn about cars? Self-learning, of course.

Jim Cantrell, an aerospace consultant whom Musk contacted out of the blue, and who became Musk’s mentor and later his Vice President of Business Development, says Musk is a prodigious sponge for knowledge. “”He is the smartest guy I’ve ever met, period,” Cantrell says. “He’s absolutely, frickin’ amazing. I don’t even think he sleeps.”

Once Cantrell realized that he and Musk shared an affinity for applied knowledge, he loaned him some textbooks to study — which were, of course, never returned — Rocket Propulsion Elements, Aerothermodynamics of Gas Turbine and Rocket Propulsion, Fundamentals of Astrodynamics, and the International Reference Guide to Space Launch Systems.

Cantrell says Musk practically memorized them. “He would quote passages verbatim from these books. He became very conversant in the material.”

The 46-year-old South African-born inventor, innovator, scientist and entrepreneur is pushing the envelopes across a range of industries, and making it seem effortless to achieve impossible dreams. Along with Tesla and SpaceX, he is the founder of Zip2, Paypal, SolarCity, Hyperloop, Open AI, Neurolink, and the Boring Company, and has amassed a net worth of around $20 billion.

His life has been a long sequence of utterly impossible tasks that he set for himself — and again and again, despite the naysayers who said he could never do it, went ahead and made them into a reality, transforming the way we live every time and pushing the frontiers of the possible. Or perhaps, in his case, the impossible.

““You have to be very careful telling him that something is impossible,” says Max Hodak, president of Neuralink, one of Musk’s companies. “If you are going to say something is not possible it had better be limited by a law of physics or you are going to end up looking stupid.”

Though he has been said to suffer from depression, in his work life, Musk is an incorrigible believer in thinking positive, convinced that once you show that the impossible is possible, probability will do the rest. “If you get up in the morning and think the future is going to be better, it is a bright day,” he says.

He does not tolerate naysayers lightly, convinced that the future belongs to those who dream. When Henry Ford invented the first motor car, people dismissed him as a novelty, saying, “What’s wrong with a horse?” When the first steam-driven train was invented, people dismissed it as impractical, saying that it was foolish to think of criss-crossing an entire country with steel tracks.

How does Musk achieve his impossible dreams? By sometimes working a 100-hour week, and pushing his own workers to do the same. “Tesla and SpaceX workers should put in 80 to 100 hours a week to ‘change the world’,” he said. “Nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week. . . [you need] about 80 sustained, peaking above 100 at times.”

Once, when under pressure to meet targets for his Model 3 car, he pushed his workers to work 12-16 hour weeks, and even worked the same shifts as them, often sleeping on the factory floor. He’d advised people to focus on the signal over the noise. “Don’t waste time on anything that doesn’t change the world.”

He surrounds himself with talented, brilliant and good-hearted people, leaving them be to do their best. — and most importantly, making room for failure. He actually values failure, often advising people to solicit negative criticism. “Failure is an option,” he says. “If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”

Musk once said, “I think it’s possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary.” He’s walking proof of the truth of that.