Edison Marketing Ideas

Thomas Edison Ideas

Million Dollar Edison inventions revealed

homas Edison was surely the greatest inventive geniuses of all time.

With thousands of patents to his name, who better to instruct you in the strategies of invention, creative genius and mind empowerment?

Wily Walnut reveals Thomas Edison's Top 10 secret "Million Dollar" invention strategies below:

1. Put your "heads together" with a mastermind alliance invention factory.
Most of us know of Edison as the genius who invented the light bulb, but did you know he also developed a system for inventing? He realized that there were sage words in the old saying, "two heads are better than one". So he brought together teams of people having different areas of expertise, and got them working together on problems and visionary projects.

He set up his "Invention Factory" at Menlo Park in New Jersey and employed the best minds from around the globe. Together, Edison and his mastermind team cranked out invention after invention!

If you have read any of Napoleon Hill's books, you will be familiar with the concept of a mastermind group alliance. Hill first learned of the concept from Andrew Carnegie but realized its true potential while witnessing Edison and Henry Ford use it so powerfully to create and dominate their industries.

Throughout history geniuses have had role models, mentors, heroes and mastermind groups from whom they drew inspiration and support in order to achieve their goals. I guess it's originally a tribal thing ... clanning with the strong and smart in order to survive and thrive.

In order to pursue your own genius, you must develop a cadre of friends and advisers who you admire and value. Determine your goals in life and the areas that they fall under. Then cultivate friendships and joint ventures with people who you think can help you succeed in a certain area.

If you want to have a great relationship, then search out, befriend and learn from people who have great relationships. Discover what they do differently, and emulate them. If you want to learn to be a superb actor, you can't do it alone, you need to get on the stage and in front of the camera with "the greats" of today. All the stars start out in bit roles alongside the heavyweight stars of the day and they learn from them.

Edison's Invention Factory was not simply an environment for Edison to learn from others who knew more than him, however. The creative process invokes different elements mixing together to create new forms. Think of it like two sticks rubbing together to generate heat and then a flame. When you bring two or more minds together, the sparks really begin to fly!

Edison's Invention Factory was a think-tank, a hot house for inventions. All those sharp minds forced together and focussed on specific aims combined to form more than the sum of the parts. To paraphrase the Bible, it's as though the Creative Spirit says, "When two or three gather in my name, I'll be there!"

A Mastermind Alliance is formed when you get two or more people working productively together in total harmony towards a common definite aim. It allows you to use the full strength, training, experience and knowledge of the other people as if that were your own. Each of the minds involved are expanded and reinforced by exposure to the other minds.

We are social animals and our brains are only made complete when we are together. Jokes aside, any married man will admit that his thinking is more balanced than when he was single by the close contact with his wife. Thoughts cluster and bloom in company... well, stimulating company! You really don't want a Gomer Pyle or Homer Simpson in your mastermind group!

Here's a guide to setting up your own mastermind alliance. It's up to you to turn it into an idea or invention factory:

• Determine your goals and your purpose.
Genius gets its legs by having purpose. Get clear on your "definite major purpose". You need to formulate your group and ensure that everybody in it shares the same purpose or one closely aligned to yours.

• Select the members of your alliance.
When choosing your team members, the essential things that each member must bring to the group are an ability to do the job and the ability to work in harmony with the others in the group. Don't be swayed by friendship in choosing your team. If your best friend doesn't have the qualities you are looking for in order to achieve your purpose, then he or she shouldn't be a part of your mastermind group. Forging the ideal mastermind group will be a process of trial and error. There will inevitably be unaccounted for areas of knowledge that you need to fill. And some existing people may just not work out and will merit "the order of the boot"!

• Specify the rewards of membership.
To further the harmony of the group, you have to set out clearly what rewards and benefits will accrue to the members of your mastermind group. Get very clear on this at the outset to avoid later recriminations and wrangles. Wealth will obviously be the most significant motivator in a commercial mastermind venture, but people are also moved to action by other motives such as self-preservation; love; fear; sex; desire for life after death; freedom for mind and body; anger; hate; desire for fame, respect and self-expression.

• Schedule regular meetings.
It's no use having a mastermind group if you don't meet regularly to make progress towards your goal. Be sure to establish times and places where you can get together to work on the challenges that you have set yourselves.

So there you have it. Get your group together and shoot for the moon. Bring in the best people that you can find, lead them well, ensure fairness in the group, and together you'll dominate life and achieve your purpose and goals.

Forming an "internal" mastermind group of famous advisors - not such a nutty idea.
Okay, we've talked about the value of establishing a mastermind group of people to help you achieve your definite chief aim. Now, sometimes, circumstances don't allow for you to easily build a mastermind group. Maybe you live in an environment where there are very few people around with skills that will challenge and enhance your own. Maybe you just live in a hut in the woods with nobody but your trusty PC for company (hey, I'm almost there myself!). No matter.

You can still make use of the mastermind principle to stimulate your own creativity. You do it by creating an internal "imaginary" group of counselors. Now, even if you have an external group supporting you, this exercise will still bring you immeasurable benefits. So listen up.

The beauty of this exercise is that you get to choose all your heroes and heroines, whether they are living idols or long-dead luminaries from the history books. It's totally up to you whether you want Jesus, Buddha, Lau Tzu, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, Casanova, Elvis or Schwarzenegger as part of your internal mastermind group.

Naturally, you aren't limited by how many are on your inner team, and you can always form different mastermind groups for different purposes. You might choose to have a spiritual-philosophical mastermind group to help you "know yourself" and grow in wisdom, and an entrepreneurial mastermind group to help your business flourish.

You can choose the team to specialize in your chosen area of interest. Or you might prefer the "dinner-table" approach and pick people from diverse fields in order to stimulate lively debate through the broad range of subjects and interests covered.

If you don't already know very much about your chosen team members, get some info on them. The internet is the quickest source of information. Use www.google.com and just search using the person's name. Look at the lists of links that come up, and choose those that sound most promising. You might also try searching under other terms that are related to that person.

Make use of your library and bookstore too. There are usually great biographies available on the people you want on your inner advisor team.

The point of all this is that you want to get exposure to as much information about the person as you can. Books, audio tapes, videos, CD-Roms, biographies, autobiographies. You are feeding the information to your subconscious mind. It will take the information and like a police artist it will build up a multi-dimensional picture of the person.

It might also be said that you use this evidence to help "tune in" to the vibration, to the morphic field, to the archetypal meme, perhaps to the very soul of that person in order to share in their wisdom, insight and ways of thinking, acting and being.

How many people should be in your internal mastermind group? Between 3 and 12 is probably about right. I think 12 is a good number to aim for (hey - it worked for JC!). As you will be studying their lives in great depth, you can start small and add others as time permits.

Once you have chosen your internal team -create an imaginary meeting area. This can be anything you like: a boardroom with an Arthurian round table; a tranquil Eden-like garden; a sacred temple; a restaurant in Outer Space. Whatever it is, make it special and relaxing to you.

Take time out from your day to relax. Use a relaxation method like self-hypnosis, or autogenics, or simply get comfortable, close your eyes and count slowly backwards from 100 to 0. When you are deeply relaxed, imagine getting into a lift with a comfortable bed in it. Lie back on the bed, and feel the lift smoothly moving. Is it going up or is it going down? You won't know ... the ride is so smooth and comfortable. When it comes to a stop, notice the doors slide quietly open and you can enter your chosen meeting area. As you enter, notice each of your mastermind members arriving simultaneously and welcome them and express your gratitude for their presence. But don't kiss ass too much! This is your mastermind group!

How you organize your meeting is up to you. Set a purpose for each meeting. State your case and then let each personality contribute, as they will. Don't be surprised if after a while these meetings take on a life of their own, as they did for Napoleon Hill:

"My method of addressing the members of the imaginary cabinet would vary, according to the traits of character in which I was, for the moment, most interested in acquiring. I studied the records of their lives with painstaking care. After some months of this nightly procedure, I was astounded by the discovery that these imaginary figures became apparently real."

Thomas Edison goes on to say:

"... while the members of my cabinet may be purely fictional, and the meetings existent only in my own imagination, they have led me into glorious paths of adventure, rekindled an appreciation of true greatness, encouraged creative endeavor, and emboldened the expression of honest thought."

Use the power of external and internal mastermind groups to multiply your creative power, productivity and prosperity. It's the smart thing to do.

2. Power napping for creative gems, inspiration and invention
Thomas Edison was a man in a hurry. There was too much to do and discover in the world to be shilly-shallying around wasting time in bed! He confined himself to 3 to 5 hours of sleep a day (see boxed quote below) sometimes snatched on his workshop table. But he kept a secret weapon that made his sleep highly potent for invention and creative mind prospecting.

Other luminaries such as Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan have shared that secret weapon. And it is called Power Napping!

Now while you can 'get by' on 4 or 5 hours sleep a night, new research by Dr. James B. Maas, author of the book "Power Sleep", shows that's not enough for peak health. You need to compensate in other ways. As much as anything, Edison delighted in the popular image of being a heroic tireless inventor who proclaimed sleep "a heritage from our cave man days." But really he needed to nap in the day to keep his brain functioning well. It's said that he could sleep at the drop of a hat and was once discovered asleep in a cupboard!

So Edison used power napping to catch up on much-needed rest and to give his phenomenal brain a break from conscious effort, allowing his unconscious processes to do the genius thinking for him. Let's see how that worked...

During his day, Edison would take time out by himself and relax in a chair or on a sofa. Invariably he would be working on a new invention and seeking creative solutions to the problem he was dealing with. He knew that if her could get into that "twilight state" between being awake and being asleep, he could access the pure creative genius of his subconscious mind.

To prevent himself from crossing all the way over the "genius gap" into deep sleep, he would nap with his hand propped up on his elbow while he clutched a handful of ball-bearings. Then he would just drift off to sleep, knowing that his subconscious mind would take up the challenge of his problem and provide a solution. As soon as he went into too deep a sleep, his hand would drop and the ball-bearings would spill noisily on the floor, waking him up again. He'd then write down whatever was in his mind.

It doesn't take long to train yourself to power nap. If you are only getting 4 or 5 hours of sleep a night, twenty minutes napping can recharge your brain and give you a real mental, emotional and physical lift, so that you can perform at your peak again.

When looking for creative answers to problems or new ideas for songs, paintings, poems, novels or inventions, do what your grandmother always recommended and "sleep on it". Let your subconscious mind go to work for you while you sleep.

Power napping is a great way of catching up on lost sleep. But 8 hours a day is still recommended for peak health and well-being. Edison was so driven by his commitment to be productive, that he would not allow himself to sleep more than a few short hours a night. That doesn't necessarily make it the ideal lifestyle for everyone. Albert Einstein admitted that he needed at least 10 hours sleep a night to perform at his best.

I personally find that 4 or 5 hours sleep a night goes by like a blip. I don't remember my dreams as easily. It's easy to get grouchy later in the day. When I sleep for 7 - 8 hours, my sleep seems leisurely and full of the magic of dreams, and I wake up happy.

What about you?

They do what they like to do (Dated 1921)
"People will not only do what they like to do - they overdo it 100 per cent. Most people overeat 100 per cent, and oversleep 100 per cent, because they like it. That extra 100 per cent makes them unhealthy and inefficient. The person who sleeps eight or ten hours a night is never fully asleep and never fully awake--they have only different degrees of doze through the twenty-four hours. Most people seem to think they must eat until they are no longer hungry. Most of their energies are taken up in digesting what they eat. I see what people eat and for myself half as much is enough.

For myself I never found need of more than four or five hours' sleep in the twenty-four. I never dream. It's real sleep. When by chance I have taken more I wake dull and indolent. We are always hearing people talk about "loss of sleep" as a calamity. They better call it loss of time, vitality and opportunities. Just to satisfy my curiosity I have gone through files of the British Medical Journal and could not find a single case reported of anybody being hurt by loss of sleep. Insomnia is different entirely--but some people think they have insomnia if they can sleep only ten hours every night."

- From the notes and journals of Thomas Alva Edison

Are you getting enough sleep?
"If you're getting less than eight hours of sleep each night, including weekends, or if you fall asleep instantly, or need an alarm clock to wake up, consider yourself one of millions of chronically sleep-deprived people--perhaps blissfully ignorant of how sleepy and ineffective you are, or how dynamic you could be with adequate sleep.

The sleeping brain is highly active at various times during the night, performing numerous physiological, neurological, and biochemical housekeeping tasks. These are essential for everything from maintaining life itself to reorganizing and enhancing thinking and memory. This enables us to remember the past, organize the present, and anticipate the future."

From "Power Sleep" by Dr. James B. Maas

Modern life is a mean old bitch sometimes and we don't get the chance to sleep as much as we would like. It's important to try and give yourself "top-up" times when you catch up on sleep. Either schedule earlier nights on weekends or use the power nap technique to get your rest. You'll live longer and smarter if you get the sleep you need.

And sleep is a great way to access your creativity, isn't that right Mr. Edison?

3. Set yourself an idea quota and become immensely productive.
A remarkable trait of geniuses is their capacity for immense productivity. Thomas Edison is legendary for his indefatigable output. By the time of his death in 1931, he held 1,093 patents, which is still the record for an individual. He ensured productivity by giving himself and his co-workers idea quotas.

Edison's own personal quota involved coming up with one minor invention every 10 days and a major invention every six months. Isn't that astonishing!

Now most of us would be quite chuffed to create one minor invention in a lifetime. But we set our targets far too low!

Genius grows by the demands placed upon it. Get "off your duff" and set yourself some new targets. If you are a writer, aim for a chapter a day, or an info-packed report every 3 days. If you are an artist, look at how you can increase your output. If you are an entrepreneur, don't give your mind an excuse to slack off: set yourself targets for ideas in marketing, sales, new products.

Be specific. Force yourself to come up with 50 ideas if you are working alone. If you are part of a team, expand the quota.

When you give yourself deadlines, your brain gets serious. Journalists don't get time to flim-flam around contemplating their navels - they have deadlines and word counts to meet - and heaven help them if they miss a deadline. Their copy has to be honed and sharp - just what the editor ordered.

You'll be amazed how your thinking skills improve under the pressure of speed and a specific target to be met. Pressure makes diamonds.

Creative types are often the worst in the world for procrastination, and for languishing in their "art". Forget it! If you want to be remembered as one of the greats, get your ass in gear because you've got a lot of catching up to do. If you want to wear the label "Genius" you need to be prodigious!

Now prodigious means that out of quantity will come quality. When you are generating ideas, some will be bad. But think of them as stepping-stones to the good ones. If you didn't get the bad ideas, you might not cross over to the "million dollar" ideas. Edison knew this and was also very cognizant of the fact that bad ideas can combine to form good ones.

As a rough guide, when generating ideas to meet a quota, your best ideas tend to come in the later stages. The first ideas that you generate are the most obvious and common. These are the things your brain is most familiar with in relation to the central idea or theme that you are dealing with. Equivalent to sound bite easy-to-deal-with knowledge.

It's like someone saying, "What shall we do tonight?" And your brain says, "Go to the movies, watch TV or go for a pizza." You know, the easy default options. To be creative you have to push beyond the obvious and the habitual. Be prepared to sweat the best ideas out in order to meet your quota. You should be really, really stretching by the end.

4. Why a true genius sweats... mulish persistence and dogged determination win through to the gold.
When it comes to developing million dollar creative gems, most people stop short of reaching the mother lode while mining their own "Field of Diamonds". Genius is not airy-fairy come-up-with-a-few-ideas, sit back and let the workers carry them out. Genius takes effort and passion. Above all, it takes perseverance.

It's easy to be mediocre. It takes no effort at all to be like everybody else. The whole world gets dumbed down so that we can all smile and speak the same language... Banaleze, the language of the banal! If your brain has been well and truly Homerised and Beavisated to a mush, it's going to take some sweat to break free and contribute the best of yourself. Only comic genius Jim Carrey can make a million from becoming Dumb and Dumber. For everybody else, it's no laughing matter.

Thomas Edison has been beautifully described as having had "a bristling intolerance for laziness". We've already talked about his phenomenal output in the Idea Quota section. He lived and betrayed himself publicly as a plainspeaking workaholic, often working up to 112 hours a week (that's 16 hours a day). Frequently he would stay overnight at his factory, stretching himself out on a laboratory bench. His second wife, Mina, thought this was undignified for a man of his standing and put a cot-bed in the corner of his library so that he could take power naps there.

As a child, Edison had read the book 'Self-Help' by Samuel Smiles and taken its principles to heart. He believed firmly in pulling oneself up by the bootstaps! He was a realist when it came to the process of invention, saying: "Invention is 2% inspiration and 98% perspiration."

This theme of hard work and persistence was stressed throughout his life. At times he was annoyed by the way people attributed his phenomenal inventions down to his genius alone while dismissing the gut-wrenching effort he put into developing a project. On one such occasion, he asserted: "Genius is hard work, stick-to-itiveness, and common sense."

Some commentators think he was being wry when he likened his genius to common sense. And from the mental processing point of view they are right to question him. Edison did think in an extraordinary way as we are discovering. But there is a long, long way from inspired idea to physical reality. And it takes common sense to see that and be prepared to walk that extra mile.

There is a tenacity to genius. It's the ability to dig deep and hold on to the vision. When you have an idea, you nurture it and build it up to become invulnerable in your mind. You set to work to manifest your idea. In truth the process of creation and invention should come with a hard hat, goggles and body armour. Once you set your idea out there you have to be prepared for the flak and detritus that life will throw at you.

"Eurgh a new idea! Let's splatter the bas**rd!"

People thought Walt Disney was mad when he proposed to build a fantasy theme park in the middle of the Florida swamps. And he wanted to base the whole thing around the idea of a talking mouse! "Who let him out of the nut house?" they probably whispered in the halls.

Do you think it took sweat, perseverance and toil to build that place, to hold onto the vision and overcome all objections? You bet it did! Walt Disney died before Disneyland was officially opened. Someone said to his son, "It's a real shame Walt didn't get to see it." To which Disney's son replied, "He saw it first. That's why you can see it now."

"Hang in there! is more than an expression of encouragement to someone experiencing hardship or difficulty; it is sound advice for anyone intent on doing good in the world. Whether by leading or prodding others, or improving oneself, or contributing in the thick of things to some larger cause, perseverance is often crucial to success...Much good that might have been achieved in the world is lost through hesitation, faltering, wavering, vacillating, or just not sticking with it."

- From "The Book of Virtues" by William J. Bennett

In a way, great ideas are cheap. You and I can sit here and think of a teletransporter, like they use on Star Trek. Press a button and your atoms and molecules are disassembled beamed across the planet (or the universe) and reassembled there. But between the idea and the reality there's a huge gulf. Who's going to cross that gulf? That's where the Mule rules. One step after another. Head down. Keep plugging away. Discovering the science and the engineering to make it possible. It may take a hundred years of effort and experimentation, of public education and explanation, of marketing and funding. It may take five hundred years. Or twenty?

Ideas are a blessing and sometimes a curse. A blessing to the beneficiaries of those ideas but sometimes a curse to those who have to turn them into reality. But the rewards of perseverance are great.

Thomas Edison and his staff sweated through 50,000 experiments to perfect the alkaline battery! Can you possibly imagine that kind of tenacity? It's born of vision and the commitment to that vision. When you have an idea that you know is a good one, that you know will enhance other people's lives as well as your own, you are going to walk through fire to get it out there.

The key to dealing with the "impossible task" is, was and always will be, to break that task into smaller chunks. Let's face it, there are many developments that can be measured by the span of lifetimes of those who contributed to that development. Many things are just so big that they take "giants standing on the shoulders of giants" to achieve the end result. Sometimes you can only add one brick to a palace wall. But without your brick, the whole lot couldn't stand.

All you can do with your mammoth ideas is chunk them down, take them one stage, one step at a time. Relentlessly.

5. Fail your way to success! why failure is so wonderful
Win! Win at all costs! You've got to get it right! It must be perfect! We all have those ideas drummed into us. The winners get the wreaths and glory, the losers get, at best, a pat on the back and an "at least you tried". Anything other than first place is considered losing. Anything other than the right answer is considered the wrong answer.

The genius however sees losing as the track to winning, and failure as the path to success. Your "failures" are nothing more than lessons. See them as signposts directing you back onto the true path.

In this era, where our Gods are movie stars, super models, pop stars and sports stars, we are spellbound by the illusion of instant perfection. In most movies, the hero doesn't fail, he doesn't get it wrong, he always knows exactly what to do to stop the bomb from going off with seconds to spare, to say the right thing to get the girl, the witty retort to silence an enemy. Hey ... he's got a script! He's got a stunt double! He's got special effects! He's got multiple takes!

That beautiful actress doesn't look like that in real life. It takes an army of make-up artists, hairdressers and stylists, plus a bundle of lighting effects to create that look. She took specialized intensive instruction for 3 months prior to filming to be able to dance like that! Plus, she has a double for the really complicated parts!

Pop stars are styled and filmed by masters of illusion. Sporting stars - you only see them after they've spent a lifetime of practicing, of losing, of failing, of gradually improving.

When Thomas Edison was seeking to invent the electric light bulb, he didn't get it right the first time. Did he immediately throw a 'wobbly' and say, "I'm a big fat failure!"? Did he throw his arms up in the air and sigh, "This is just too hard. I give up!"? Did he grab a bottle of booze and become an alcoholic and live in his memories, slurring to his fellow street bums, "I *hic!* tried to invent *hic!* the electric light bulb once *hic!* .... but it didn't work *hic!* out... life sucks."?

No. No. No!

When it didn't work the first time, Edison made a note of exactly what he'd done and what components he had used. Then he made an adjustment to the experiment and tried again. And when that "failed" he made a note of that, readjusted and tried again. He kept learning from every experiment. He learned all the ways that it wouldn't work. He discovered all the chemicals and elements that wouldn't work. And each time he found a way that wouldn't work, he knew he was closer to finding a way that would work.

It took him approximately 10,000 experiments to invent the perfect set-up for the electric light bulb. There was a lot of learning to go through. Nobody had done it before. He couldn't read a book about it. He simply had to plug away, failing and learning, until he and his muckers worked out the right way to do it

An airline pilot has to fly from New York to Madrid. He has a flight plan with straight lines to follow. But most of the time he is off track. That airline pilot constantly "fails" to fly in a straight line. He is forced to make continual readjustments to make up for his failings. By doing that he arrives at the correct destination. It's the same principle used in navigating a sailing ship. You constantly criss-cross the line you are supposed to follow, hardly ever following it exactly.

You must actively seek out failure and delight in it. The most sublime creative ideas are often found in the shadow of the most unworkable and crazy ideas. Do not be afraid of getting anything wrong. There is no wrong. There is only a lesson in how not to do it! And that lesson is priceless...

Nothing is ever lost by failure, error or disaster. Unless you allow it to be lost. Do not accept defeat lightly. Every dusk has a new dawn...

Failure is your friend. Every failure is simply an Experiment. Experiments are set up to see what results occur and to learn from doing them.

"Failures are pivotal momens that force you to take a different path - a path to a better place." So love them!

Many of us fear failure. But we also want success in life and all the "jolly lolly" that goes with it. Babe Ruth is in the Baseball Hall of Fame as the biggest hitter of home runs (apparently... ) and is also in there for the most strike outs! He put it this way, "Every strike brings me closer to the next home run." It's like they say in the Lottery, "You've got to be in to win!"

You first learnt to walk after falling down thousands of times. Thank God you didn't take every fall as some personal flaw - or you'd still be riding around in a pram!

As a rough guide in life, you can expect to fail 80% of the time in a life well lived... The Edison Family.