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New Book Excerpts
. . . Necessity is not the mother of invention.
Laziness and fun are . . .
. . . When I was a kid, I sometimes used to stay overnight at my grandparents house. They had three books in their den: . . .Cheaper by the Dozen (a story about industrial engineer Frank Galbraith and his family), a book of Plays by Ibsen (a social scientist playwright) and The Call of the Wild (a book about a dog finding its way in the world) . . . it was an 'uncluttered' way of giving a kid an education . . . my grandparents either intentionally or unintentionally were very wise . . . they never told me to read, or to read those three books . . . They just gave me the time to be lazy.
. . . through my grandparents (and their books), I learned that one of the first and foremost industrial engineers in the United States (Frank Galbraith) had a philosophy: If you want to find the easiest and most efficient way to do a job, find a lazy man. A lazy man will always expend the least amount of energy to get a job done.
Lazy people are a whole 'class' of inventors (which by definition technically means that they are not very lazy at all). Lazy people invent 'things' to do their work for them. They invent processes to make things flow more smoothly . . .
. . . In retrospect, I believe my grandparents were 'lazy' people who recognized the value of laziness.
In all of his 'laziness,' my grandfather built a feed and seed company and distributing business that mixed specialty feeds and had employees on the road and working in a string of warehouses while distributing products and hardware for every agricultural purpose imaginable.
He was a master of maintenance and made fixing things look easy: a little time, the right knowledge and the right tools and you're off and running. Warehouses were, for the most part, dusty but clean and VERY well organized.
At a time when most women stayed home, my grandmother made sure my grandfather didn't have to think too much when he got home. She kept their house uncluttered and clean and very well organized.
During the years when hats and mittens were expensive to buy (and most people still darned their own socks because those were expensive too), she kept eleven grandkids and three families in hats and mittens . . .
. . . They have since passed on but I remember just how much these 'lazy' people got done . . .
. . . With all this talk about laziness, what about fun? Well, some people would say being lazy is fun! But I was reminded today of another element of fun as I chatted with an old business contact . . . and it was he who reminded me of the saying: 'Necessity is the mother of invention.'
Advances in many fields: aviation, electronics, electricity, chemistry, automobiles, etc. have been the direct result of people who just simply enjoyed trying different things to find out what would happen or who just wanted to know how fast they could drive or how high they could soar.
Computer advances have many times been the direct result of people who enjoyed access to information and knew that it would be a lot more fun creating things and they'd be able to do a lot more if they weren't always starting from scratch. Google and Wikipedia are prime examples of the collective energies of millions of people globally who don't like starting from scratch (and don't think others should have to do so either) . . .
. . . Getting back to . . . Necessity is not the mother of invention. Laziness and fun are.
It's possible to find people who would never accomplish anything at all if left to their own devices with sufficient money to simply be lazy.
The flip side of that is you can have millions of people who have true needs who never have the time, money, education, intellect, resources or energy necessary to figure out ways to fill those needs.
A woman scrounging for clean water and fuel daily who has limited education and kids to take care of and try to feed is not in a position to do research on solar stoves. It's unlikely that she'd have the materials or tools to even think about the possibilities. And it's even less likely that she'd know about the benefits of distillation.
People like this exist in the world. It is easy to take for granted the infrastructure which exists in well-developed nations. When we take it for granted, we forget how easy it would be to devolve to lower levels if we stop paying attention not only to our own needs but to other people's needs . . .
(I really like Frank Galbraith's work but I had to write this) . . . Frank Galbraith and men like him were the 'founders' of repetitive motion injuries . . .
. . . He helped transform how people think about work processes and along the way, helped the world become much more productive and wealthy.
But he and others like him also inadvertently made us poorer in some respects because they did not recognize, understand and make adjustments for processes which would cause repetitive motion injuries . . .
. . . I don't want to leave that saying: 'Necessity is the mother of invention' without noting . . . 'Necessity is the mother of need.'
When things are necessary, they are needed. When you have too many needs which 'need' to be filled in a society, you have a society which feels poor (and might quite possibly be poor) . . .
Copyright © 2009-2010 by Lisa L. Osen |
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