I just had a very successful failure on one of my new inventions. I know that the sentence I just wrote probably doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to anyone other than an inventor. Successful failures are what happens when the invention you are working on and have been building for the last month or so fails miserably, but for some strange reason you are happy and excited about it. That’s what happened to me. I literally spent the last month and a half working diligently on my idea. I spent hours online researching, I talked to experts on the subject, I bought the parts that I needed from around the world and I built my prototype. I was very proud of myself and excited to try it out. The item I built is electrical which is a subject I knew nothing about before I started my research. Any way, it didn’t work. Well, that’s not exactly true. It didn’t work how I expected it to, but it did work just enough to tell me what I was doing would work, I had just done it wrong. I guess I had my Edison light bulb moment. You know what I mean, it took Edison a whole lot of trial and error and lots of failures before he got a bulb that actually worked how he had envisioned. My prototype in a way was my first failing light bulb. It worked just enough to get me happily beaming and running around the house all excited like a maniac. I actually woke my wife up from a sound sleep to tell her that it worked and that I had done it. Strangely though, she wasn’t very happy to hear my good news. Then, about 2 minutes later it stopped working. Let me tell you I was not a happy camper when it stopped…not at first. I went back online, I did more research and I talked to my expert again and I realized my mistake. I didn’t quite get it right but I am on the right track. I now know what I need to do and if all my new calculations are correct I will have my working prototype with attempt number 2. I ordered the new parts, I’m beginning to re-build and anxiously awaiting those parts so I can prove to myself that it can be done. Inventing is such an exciting and interesting way of looking at the world. I have to tell you there are not many things you can fail at in this world and still feel like you succeeded. The icing on the cake is that the idea made me want to go out and figure it out and in doing so I learned something. I learned a lot of somethings and now I have just a little more knowledge and understand things just a tad better which at the age of 41 is a good thing, a very good thing. I want to go on exploring and learning for the rest of my life. It feels good to keep learning and growing. I hope I am around to have many many more successful failures.