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11Ideas/Innovation

Ideas without action are worthless

Anybody who is past third grade knows that Sir Isaac Newton formulated the Law of Gravity. Back in 1684, Isaac was sitting under an apple tree and saw an apple fall (or it bonked him on the head, depending on your source).

His main goal that day was to take a little rest, but watching this everyday autumn event, he hit on something really big, aka the Law of Gravity: the gravitational attraction between two bodies is directly proportional to the product of the masses of the two bodies and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.

Wait a minute! Wasn’t he just loafing around—nothing in particular on his mind, except to take it easy?

I’ve never had an idea quite like that, but some of my really inspired thoughts came to me not while I was sitting at my desk, but in an unusual assortment of venues—watching a football game, lining up a putt, looking out the window of an airplane. I do some of my best thinking at 30,000 feet. The few minutes away from your daily grind can be a tremendous source of inspiration. The trick is putting those ideas into action.

Another fellow, who lived a few years before Newton, sat watching a great swinging lamp as a form of meditation. Then Galileo hit on the idea of a pendulum swinging as a means of accurately measuring the passage of time. (Impress your friends with this tidbit: it’s called isochronism.) The tick-tock of your grandfather clock started centuries ago.