OT: Calling all straight F students..., Don't ever give up Options

[BigD9146gt]

I was never good at homework. I liked being in school learning, just never could remember any of it when the time came to barf it back to the teacher. This is an email my old man sent me, he's a pretty sucessful mechanical engineer who also didn't do all that well in school. Enjoy.

Charles Kettering invented no knock self-starter, diesel locomotive and paint for cars.

Intelligent Ignorance:

The more education you have the less likely you are to become an inventor. The reason why is this: from the time a kid starts Kindergarten to the time he graduates from college, he will be examined two or three times a year and if he flunks once, he’s out. Now an inventor fails 999 times and if he succeeds once, he’s in. An inventor treats his failures simply as practice shots.

He believed a problem was more than willing to be solved provided the researcher remembered who was boss, by which he meant the problem, not himself. The only difference between a problem and a solution, he used to say, is that people understand the solution. Solutions only involve a change in perception, since the solution must have existed all along with the problem itself. A researcher, he argued, was there not to master the problem but to make it give birth to its solution.