How Innovative Ideas Arise

The Toaster Project (Thomas Thwaites)

To make a toaster, it takes a whole civilization. He decided to start with pebbles and sludge and
working his way up. Many days and hours wasted because of many failures. Then he decided at
last to use mica, because mica is a very good insulator of electricity. He wanted to make the
body of the toaster out of plastic. Thwaites had to settle for collecting plastic scraps and melting
them into the shape of his toaster case. Nonetheless, he considers it a partial success.

Starting from scratch is usually a bad idea. Furthermore, rather than dismantling the entire
system and starting again, the most effective approach to achieve progress is to make 1%
improvements to what currently works. Don’t Start From Scratch. Build On Others’ Successes.
Take the core concept and make it better.

In order to progress, you need to know what’s out there already. It means understanding how
things work before taking the next step. Old ideas are a secret weapon. It can help save time
and effort. Those things that already made can help you to move forward.
Eventually, you learn what it takes to innovate. It's typically preferable to expand on what
already works when dealing with a difficult situation.

Absolute Success is Luck. Relative Success is Hard Work.

The Story of Project 523

There was disease had become a huge problem. Tu Youyou was appointed the head of a secret
research group in Beijing to find a cure for malaria. She traveled to remote regions in search of
plants that might contain a cure. Hundreds of tests were run. Most of them yielded nothing.
Tu's team had been working on the subject for two years, but she decided to re-examine
everything she'd ever studied. After many ups and downs. The artemisinin treatment has been
administered over 1 billion times to malaria patients.

Tu Youyou was not fabulously lucky. My favorite fact about her is that she has no postgraduate
degree and no research experience abroad. But she work hard. Persistent. Diligent. Driven. For
decades she didn't give up and she helped save millions of lives as a result. Her story is a
brilliant example of how important hard work can be in achieving success.

Absolute success is luck. Relative success is choices and habits. It doesn’t matter how successful
or unsuccessful you are right now. What matters is whether your habits are putting you on the
path toward success. You can only control the slope of your success, not your initial position. In
the end, we cannot control our luck—good or bad—but we can control our effort and
preparation. Luck smiles on us all from time to time. And when it does, the way to honor your
good fortune is to work hard and make the most of it.
a success with hardwork will give you experience. you may not get success at the first
stage of your hardwork, but you will learn to accept your mistakes, correct them and
move on. 
for a success both luck and hard work is essential. a hardwork without luck and luck
without hardwork cannot bear the proper fruit of success.

The Ultimate Productivity Hack is Saying No -James Clear

How often do people ask you to do something and you just reply,

“Sure thing.” Three days later, you're overwhelmed by how much is on your to-do list. We
become frustrated by our obligations even though we were the ones who said yes to them in
the first place.

It's worth asking if things are necessary. Many of them are not, and a simple “no” will be more
productive than whatever work the most efficient person can muster. We agree too many
requests not because we want to do them, but because we don't want to be seen as rude,
arrogant, or unhelpful. Like friends, family, neighbor etc. Saying no to these people can be
particularly difficult because we like them and want to support them.

Every time we say yes to a request, we are also saying no to anything else we might accomplish
with the time. Once you have committed to something, you have already decided how that
future block of time will be spent.

In other words, saying no saves you time in the future. Saying yes costs you time in the future.
Saying no is an important skill to develop at any stage of your career because it retains the most
important asset in life: your time. As the investor Pedro Sorrentino put it, “If you don’t guard
your time, people will steal it from you.” Upgrading your no doesn't mean you'll never say yes.
It just means you default to saying no and only say yes when it really makes sense.