Productivity lessons from Thomas Edison

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

By the age of 47, Edison has worked as many hours as an ordinary person only manages by 82. This genius has a lot to learn.

Hard work and perseverance

Thomas Alva Edison, an American inventor and businessman who has given the world over 1,000 inventions and received over 4,000 patents, is considered one of the most prolific scientists in world history.

According to contemporaries, Edison worked an average of 18 hours a day and preferred to work at night, when, in his own words, "the rest of the world is asleep."

There is a known case when one of Edison's inventions - an electric typewriter - did not work. Together with five assistants, Edison locked himself in the workshop, stating that he would not leave until he brought his creation to a working state. Then he worked 60 hours without interruptions and sleep, fixed the problem with the machine, and then slept for 30 hours in a row.

Thomas Edison's work habits

Doing something doesn't mean working. The goal of any work is to produce or achieve a result, which is accompanied by preliminary calculation, consistency, planning, meaningfulness, a worthy destination, as well as work by the sweat of a brow.

Thomas Edison

The famous American psychologist and writer Orison Swet Marden in one of his books gives an interview in which the great inventor shares the secrets of his productivity. According to Edison himself, at that moment he did not work very much - only 14-15 hours a day. From eight in the morning he worked in the laboratory, at six in the evening he returned home "for tea", after which he continued to study at home, and at 11 went to bed. To Marden's astonished remark that a 14-hour working day is not quite what it is customary to say "not so much", Edison replied that before that he had worked 20 hours a day for 15 years.

When Edison was 47 years old, he calculated that if he divided the time he devoted to work by the standard eight hours a day, he would be 82 years old.

According to the scientist, there was no place for accidents in his work, except, perhaps, a phonograph. Edison was engaged only in those developments, the result of which seemed to him useful and commercially viable. He did not waste time on spectacular but useless toys, the only value of which is their innovation.

An eighteen-hour day is too high a price to pay for success? From Edison's point of view, not at all.

If you get up at seven and go to bed at eleven, there are 16 hours left during which you do something. You walk, read, write, meditate. The difference is that most people focus their efforts on many different things, and I - on one. Everyone could succeed if they devoted all their time to one goal.

Thomas Edison

The problem with this approach, according to the inventor himself, is that not everyone has such a goal - that is the only thing for which a person is ready to give up everything else. Success, according to Edison, is the product of the most brutal, uncompromising application of mental and physical abilities in one direction.

In addition, Thomas Edison meticulously recorded and illustrated all stages of his development. After the death of the scientist, 3,500 notebooks and many separate records were found, in the amount of more than 5 million documents. The habit of meticulously recording every detail of his work on paper is another of the most important secrets of Edison's success.

If each of us did our best, we would shock ourselves.

Thomas Edison