Thomas Edison was an American inventor and businessman. He was one of the greatest American inventors of all-time, held a world-record 1,093 patents, and created the world’s first industrial research laboratory. Thomas Edison was best known as the inventor of the light bulb, the phonograph, and the motion picture camera. He had many successful ideas. His life and his quotes can be used as inspiration for your writing.
What you can learn from Thomas Edison
Let’s dive into five of his best quotes and what you can learn about writing from Thomas Edison.
1. Hard work
“Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.”
Thomas Edison
Generating great ideas and writing compelling headlines for your articles can be challenging. That’s just the beginning. It’s going to take a lot of perspiration to turn those ideas into a great article.
A lot of writers fail when they don’t maximize the full potential of their ideas. Their writing becomes a flat and uninspiring article. The best writers know articles take a lot of work and it’s all about the little things like good introductions, polishing, and analogies.
2. Patience
“Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.”
Thomas Edison
It will take a while for your writing to bear fruit. It’s going to take some time for search engines to index your articles and for you to build trust with your readers. That’s ok because you are taking control of your writing job by acting as if you are a chief executive officer (CEO). You build a relationship with your readers, share your content via social media, and consistently create binge-worthy content.
Don’t get discouraged when you don’t appear in a Google search. Also, don’t get down when you don’t make a lot of money writing online. Success doesn’t come overnight, and that’s good because if it did, you would be impatient, take short cuts, and make bad decisions.
3. Strategy
“Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration.”
Thomas Edison
Once you have a strategy for your writing on Medium or on your blog, you’ll find the task less intimidating. For example, here on Knowledge Enthusiast, I only publish on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Don’t fill your time with tasks that seem urgent. Have a strategy for balancing your mental energy and time block out your days so you are productive every day with your writing. Don’t get distracted from what you should do. Produce great content to better serve and grow your audience.
4. Failure
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
Thomas Edison
Treat every article you write as a learning experience that helps you grow as a writer. These experiences will help you become a better writer. When you create something that doesn’t work, you are one step closer to finding something that will work.
Treat every story you write as an experiment that you can learn from. This experiment will help you create better experiments in the future. Don’t stop writing because you got rejected or you didn’t make enough money right away.
It’s ok to fail. You learn more from your failures than your successes. Look at each article as an experience that will teach you something.
5. Don’t give up
“Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.”
Thomas Edison
Don’t be that person who writes and gives up after a month or two. It takes a while for a blog or a writing platform to really take off. It took three years of consistent writing for my blog to take off.
Keep writing and putting yourself out there. It will be worth it. If you want to succeed, you need to be persistent and build your momentum.
Bringing it all together on what you can learn about writing from Thomas Edison
The key to success lies in building your momentum and refusing to give up. To get something started, it takes a lot of energy and work. After it gets started, it takes less work and energy to keep it going. Thomas Edison had a lot of powerful quotes so I narrowed them down to these five to inspire you to become a better writer.
Hopefully, these quotes have given you the inspiration to keep generating ideas and keep doing what you are doing. In a world of immediate gratification, success lies in persistence and generating a lot of ideas like Thomas Edison.