A lot of people think the moment of discovery is a loud, bright, crash-bang thing that happens all in one instant.

I think that’s wishful thinking.

As humans, we can be guilty of sitting around, waiting for the next big idea to hit us. We reactively reflect, think about things, expose ourselves to relevant material and hope to have some sort of epiphany that will make us the next Alexander Graham Bell. But it’s just another excuse for not producing. Is waiting for something to be revealed to us just divine laziness?

Think about some of the biggest inventions in history. The telephone. The lightbulb. The computer. The inventors of all these things worked their butts off over a period of time to get the results they ended up with. They pitched their ideas. They got rejected time after time. But they made progress, then made improvements on their progress. They got to their finished product in increments- not all in one day.

So, instead of waiting for greatness to strike and our names to go down in the history books in the blink of an eye, we should spend our time improving on the baby steps we’ve already taken…. The path less traveled.

Interesting related reading: Myths of Innovation by Scott Berkun

I used to be a copywriter for a retail catalog. Golf, to be specific. If you’ve ever written (or read, for that matter) catalog content, you know there’s not a whole hell of a lot of creativity that goes into it. Even still, there were headlines to write, and 120 words to cram into a 25 word space- all of which had to be approved by 1.) our buyers 2.) the company… NIKE, Cobra, FootJoy, TaylorMade, or whoever. It was very unlikely that anything I ever wrote actually ended up in the catalog because it got changed somewhere down the line. But hey, they paid me, and I wasn’t complaining.

Except that I was. Every single day. Keep Reading