“Are your discoveries often brilliant intuitions? Do they come to you
while you are lying awake nights?” I asked him.
“I never did anything worth doing by accident,” he replied, “nor did
any of my inventions come indirectly through accident, except the
phonograph. No, when I have fully decided that a result is worth
getting, I go about it, and make trial after trial, until it comes.
“I have always kept,” continued Mr. Edison, “strictly within the lines
of commercially useful inventions. I have never had any time to put on
electrical wonders, valuable only as novelties to catch the popular
fancy.”
“What makes you work?” I asked with real curiosity. “What impels you
to this constant, tireless struggle? You have shown that you care
comparatively nothing for the money it makes you, and you have no
particular enthusiasm for the attending fame. What is it?”
“I like it,” he answered, after a moment of puzzled expression. “I
don’t know any other reason. Anything I have begun is always on my
mind, and I am not easy while away from it, until it is finished; and
then I hate it.”
“Hate it?” I said.
“Yes,” he affirmed, “when it is all done and is a success, I can’t bear
the sight of it. I haven’t used a telephone in ten years, and I would
go out of my way any day to miss an incandescent light.”
“You lay down rather severe rules for one who wishes to succeed in
life,” I ventured, “working eighteen hours a day.”
“Not at all,” he said. “You do something all day long, don’t you? Every
one does. If you get up at seven o’clock and go to bed at eleven, you
have put in sixteen good hours, and it is certain with most men that
they have been doing something all the time. They have been either
walking, or reading, or writing, or thinking. The only trouble is that
they do it about a great many things and I do it about one. If they
took the time in question and applied it in one direction, to one
object, they would succeed. Success is sure to follow such application.
The trouble lies in the fact that people do not have an object—one
thing to which they stick, letting all else go.”