Remember That Spectacular Idea You Never Executed?

There's a reason why most of us will never be mothers and fathers of famous inventions.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m completely comfortable with letting genius ideas fall by the wayside while real inventors are out there changing the world.

I have come up with a hundred and one inventions in my lifetime and yet, here I am…blogging.

It’s because I’ve never had the gumption that real inventors have. I come up with brilliant ideas and then lay back, expecting them to materialize out of thin air.

I’m not willing to dig in and do the dirty work it takes to ensure a novel idea comes to fruition.

They say necessity is the mother of invention.

A decade before I ever saw one in real life, I speculated on creating a shower head that heats its own water. The idea came from living in a tropical country and a strong desire to NOT have my body shocked to life by an ice-cold shower every morning.

You see, in the Caribbean, the average community home isn’t equipped with hot water and if your pipes are far enough underground the water comes out cold AF.

The best shower you’ll ever get in an average Caribbean home is room temperature.

I never did anything with my fantastical idea, but ten years later, I reviewed a little beach house on the south coast of Jamaica, and wouldn’t you know it…the shower head had an attachment that the heated water.

That could have been MY gold mine. But I was busy blogging.

The same goes for many other ideas I’ve had. More recently, I considered designing a line of outerwear specifically for dog people.

Believe me when I tell you there is no hoodie or jacket on the market with enough pockets and attachments for hardcore dog parents.

I had the entire design concept and even a catchy, kick-ass brand name in my head. But as soon as I contacted a pattern designer to hash it all out, I quit because money and work were involved.

I’m sure I’ll see one on the market in a couple of years just because someone with gumption read this article. You’re welcome.

Where would we be without diehard inventors?

For starters, we’d probably be out hunting rabbits for dinner instead of scrolling this page.

Without mathematician Charles Babbage, you wouldn’t be sitting here reading this right now. Babbage originated the concept of a digital programmable computer back in the 1800s if you can believe that.

And without a sidekick named Ada Byron, who published the first algorithm ever to be carried out on a computing machine, the computer may never have been invented.

Modern-day women, please don’t tell me you feel held down by your gender. Good old Ada was probably sitting there in the 1800s using an abacus by lantern light to carry out her work.

To take this whole thing even further, computers only understand electricity. What if no one had invented that first?

If not for electricity, we may have never evolved into the couch-sitting, scrolling schlepps we are today. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, the jury is still out. But I will say I’m happy to NOT have to chop wood to heat my home right now…or ever.

Can you imagine if nobody cared to experiment, fail, succeed, invent, and reinvent?

Millions of us couldn’t care less about being mothers and fathers of invention. But it only took one Babbage and one Ada to contribute to changing the world forever.

It takes all kinds to create balance in the world.

For as many scientifically minded inventors as there are, I bet those geniuses sit back and marvel at the creatives of the world—people just like us who can spew words a hundred miles an hour and create imagery, inspiration, and fictional universes.

Or people who can sit down with a paintbrush and a blank slate and create a masterpiece out of thin air.

Or how about strategically-minded people who plan and build entire cities around a body of water? Or the determined minds with the chops to solve murders that occurred thirty years ago.

I don’t believe that anyone has an average mind.

We’re all cut out to contribute something to the world. We just may not find ourselves on Wikipedia anytime soon.

If you choose to steal my dog hoodie invention, go ahead and buy me a coffee to say thanks! If you buy me many coffees, I’ll throw in the kick-ass brand name I have for it.

Have you ever come up with a genius idea but you failed to execute because you’re standing in your own way?

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