At around 5:30pm on Dec 10, 1914, 67-year old Thomas Edison saw his life’s work go up in flames. Ten buildings in his plant — more than half the buildings on his property — were engulfed in fire.

How would you react, if you saw your hard work — decades worth of research and notes and prototypes — go up in smoke?

This is what Edison did:

He walked over to his then 24-year-old son, Charles, and told him, “Go get your mother and all her friends. They’ll never see a fire like this again.” When Charles objected, Edison said, “It’s all right. We’ve just got rid of a lot of rubbish.”

Edison estimated that the fire had destroyed about $919,788 (which would amount to over $23 million today).

“As one of the millions of your admirers, I send you my sympathy,” fellow-inventor Nikola Tesla telegraphed him. “It is not only a personal and national loss, but a world loss, for you have been one of its greatest benefactors.”

Who would have blamed Edison if he’d sorrowfully hung up his boots that day? After all, he was 67 years of age when this happened.

But his response was, “I’ll start all over again tomorrow.” And he did.

He turned the disaster itself into an innovation. Having noticed firefighters struggling to see in the smoky darkness, Edison emerged, two days later, with a new invention — a powerful battery-powered searchlight. Within three weeks of the fire, he secured a loan. Employees worked double shifts for a while, and, four years later, his business went on to make almost $10 million.

What’s remarkable to me isn’t that Edison worked hard after the fire and recovered his momentum. That is something we see heroes doing after they fall, and Edison, with all his accomplishments, is after all, a hero.

What’s remarkable to me is that he accepted the card life dealt him that day with so much equanimity, and, even while the fire was raging, he started to work on how he might rebound from it, while he may have had little clue about how he would rise from the ashes and little reassurance he could actually succeed at doing so. As soon as he saw that he could do nothing to avert the disaster, he started to do all he could to move through it, with grace and gumption. Heck, he even found a way to invent something from the disaster.

Imagine if you and I could be mini-Edisons whenever we face any disappointment, minor or major. Where we recover our poise right away, find a creative way to benefit from the setback, and get our life back on track. What’s the secret to this near-instant activation of resilience? I think I know the answer.

You see, most of us, we sometimes feel we have agency, and at other times, we feel we do not. The Edisons — these people do not like to live one minute without feeling they have agency over their circumstances. Now as the fire story shows, they don’t always have agency over their circumstances. But by choosing to accept the circumstances they cannot change, they instantly move their mind back to a place of agency, a place where they ask themselves, “Okay, so this has happened. Now what am I going to do about it?”. It is in the asking of this question that they are able to place themselves back into the role of a hero in their life journey.

You and I can be the hero in our life journey, too. Why not begin today?

Warmly,
Hitendra

Like This Newsletter?
Share it with someone who might find it valuable.