Throughout history somebody comes up with a novel idea and, for whatever reason, it fails perfectly. Then, almost without fail, somebody else takes arguably the same concept, turns it inside out or repackages it, and boom, a huge breakthrough that achieves notoriety, success, and usually some significant financial reward. But most of us go through life thinking of success as a sort of supernatural event, a preordained occurrence that only happens to certain people. However, this is simply not the case. We look at the careers of Albert Einstein, Warren Buffet, Michael Jordan, and Bill Gates as if that sort of thing can never happen to us. We are incorrect.
Surely those are tough acts to follow but even these individuals are mere mortals who likely use their mouth to drink the way most of us do. The fact is that the vast majority of successful ideas, people, and companies don’t occur as magically or spontaneously as one might imagine. Here are five common ways in which relatively small changes can produce major breakthroughs:
- Timing. Reintroducing an idea when conditions are more favorable.
- Opportunity. Capitalizing on another’s idea because they couldn’t, for whatever reason.
- Perspective. Looking at the same thing differently, i.e. turning an idea on its side.
- Standing on the shoulders of giants. Adding a relatively small component to the great works of others.
- Luck. Just plain luck.
Einstein was indeed a genius but he did not just bang out a few equations to come up with E=MC2. He developed this maxim of the notion of matter and energy being related in some way by using conclusions and data that had been around for some time. The difference, was that Einstein had a passion for light. It was actually his notion of the invariance of the speed of light that led to the special theory of relativity and then to E=MC2. More than anything, Einstein had a unique perspective. He saw the same things others saw, but he saw them differently and the rest, as they say, is history.
Johannes Kepler, whose laws of planetary motion are famous, actually came very close to deriving the theory of gravity more than 50 years before Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica. Unfortunately, Kepler was a crazy, a religious zealot, often ill, and lived in a politically and religiously charged era. He had a lot working against him. Not to diminish Newton’s role in discovering universal gravity, but he definitely stood on the shoulders of giants, as others later stood on his.
Moving on to the business world, if you explore the origins of famous companies, you’ll find that most of them had anything but grandiose beginnings, and they often began as one thing and ended up as another:
- The first McDonald’s was a hot dog stand
- Nokia was initially a paper mill
- Sony began as a radio repair shop
- James L. Kraft, founder of Kraft Foods, sold cheese door-to-door
- Toyota originally made looms
The point is that great inventors, leaders, and companies aren’t like step functions in real life. They don’t go from zero-to-great in a heartbeat. More often than not, they stand on the shoulders of giants, see things a little bit differently, or benefit from timing, opportunity, or luck.
