The real secret of a success is simple: Do something about your ideas. Each of us has seen a new idea and said, “Why, I thought of that a year ago.” We say it with scorn, but we should direct the scorn at ourselves, not at the person who had the drive to do something about it.
Successful idea men generate ideas all the time, and they don’t hoard them. They do something about them, even if they give them away. There are a lot of other satisfactions than money in doing your. When I give an idea away and see it acted upon, I get a great thrill of satisfaction and accomplishment. The important thing is to keep having ideas and to keep putting them to work.
Most of us are lazy, however. We mean to do better, to improve ourselves, to make this year better than last one. But we fall down, we forget, we drift.
There are ways we keep prodding ourselves into reaching farther, to going beyond ourselves. We must, just like an athlete, consciously exercise our brain cells. If we do this, we will be amazed at how our creative energies will increase.
The more we see, the more our powers of observation increase. It is imperative that we push, goad,...