One evening, Thomas Edison returned home after a long day working at his research laboratory. Shortly after dinner, a man rushed to Edison’s home and delivered some devastating news.
A fire had broken out at his research factory a few miles away. Firemen from eight nearby towns were desperately trying to put out the fire, but were struggling to contain the out of control blaze.
Edison arrived and pushed his way through hundreds of onlookers and stared at the green and yellow flames, seven stories high, fueled by the many strange chemicals inside the building.
That’s when Edison quickly looked for his son and told him with the excitement of a kid on Christmas, “Go get your mother and all of her friends – they’ll never see a fire like this again!”
“What?” Edison’s son said, not understanding his father’s strange reaction to the horrific scene.
“Don’t worry,” Edison continued, “It’s alright – we’ve just gotten rid of a lot of rubbish.”
This story was told in Ryan Holiday’s book, The Obstacle is the Way. When I first read it, I just couldn’t believe Edison’s reaction to seeing his many years of hard work going up in flames.
But Edison’s point of view when disaster struck was this: What other response was there?
Even though Edison wasn’t upset, it would have been understandable if he had been.
The years of prototypes, research, and formulas inside the building had only been insured for a fraction of their worth because the building was supposed to have been built to be fire resistant with fireproof concrete. Virtually everything inside of it was now reduced to ash and gone forever.
Edison was 67 years old at the time of the fire. In today’s world, he would have been encouraged to go ahead and retire. Friends may have said that the fire was a sign to just quit and go home.
But Edison didn’t quit.
The next day, he was interviewed by a reporter and said that he wasn’t too old to make a fresh start. “I’ve been through a lot of things like this. It prevents a man from being afflicted with ennui.”
Within a month of the fire, the factory was up and running again with men working double shifts day and night to create new products that the world had never seen before. Although the damages from the fire had totaled $1 Million dollars (equivalent to $23 Million in today’s dollars), Edison and his team earned almost $10 Million in revenue that year (well over $200 Million today).
The same man that failed 2,000 times to create a workable light bulb knew that giving up was always the wrong answer. Edison actually loved to fail. He once said, “Negative results are just what I want. They’re just as valuable to me as positive results. I can never find the thing that does the job best until I find the ones that don’t.” He knew that he couldn’t succeed unless he failed.
The trials that you and I face each day may not be as significant as a fire that destroys everything we’ve ever worked for, but they can still feel significant to us, nonetheless. We need to remember that how we react to setbacks in life matters much more than whatever it is that we’re reacting to.
Edison’s formula for greatness was simple and is advice that we can apply to our lives whenever disaster does strike: Embrace failure and don’t be afraid start over, no matter how old you are.
And when your dreams go up in flames, don’t worry. You’ve just gotten rid of a lot of rubbish.