"The Sweat That Eureka Demands"

(Extract of a recent, very up-to-the-minute post of mine in Idea Champions' "The Heart of Innovation"... a couple weeks back:)

Serious about doing something innovative? Be prepared to spend many long, focused hours working on it (and working and working and reworking...)

Thomas Edison  (Wikipedia)

"We want to believe that creativity and innovation come in flashes of pure brilliance," Janet Rae-Dupree writes in the New York Times. But, "Innovation is a slow process of accretion, building small insight upon interesting fact upon tried-and-true process. Just as an oyster wraps layer upon layer of nacre atop an offending piece of sand, ultimately yielding a pearl, innovation percolates within hard work over time."
...
(As one of the greatest inventors in memory, Thomas Edison, knew so well:)

In an interview in Harpers magazine, February 1890, (stay tuned here at Heart Of Innovation as we present the latest, greatest breakthroughs! ; ) Edison explained his method:

"I would construct a theory and work on its lines until I found it was untenable. ... I speak without exaggeration when I say that I have constructed 3,000 different theories in connection with the electric light, each one of them reasonable and apparently likely to be true. Yet only in two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory."

(More of "The Sweat That Eureka Demands" here...)

Related, here in Rosswriting: 
inventors (tag)