A quick getaway
CHAPTER IX
GENIUS PLUS INITIATIVE
Genius is twenty per cent idea, thirty per cent talent, and fifty per cent initiative. Ideas are small in themselves when reduced to brass tacks, but when we put the steam behind they often turn into something tremendous.
Even a fool may have an idea, but it takes brains and pep to put one over.
Most every one has had a notion worth while, but in most cases they hold it cheap on the theory that if it really amounted to anything some genius would have thought of it long ago and put it into practical use. There is where initiative was lacking—perhaps talent as well—but initiative would have brought in talent from the outside.
The word genius has been largely misapplied. Many men who were merely astute in one way or another have been placarded with the label of genius. But the real genius is one whose idea has saved something for his fellow man in time, labor, and money. Who would have thought forty years ago that the whispering cups which children talked into, and by means of which they could hear each other’s voices a distance of fifty or a hundred feet, would turn into the greatest labor-saving device in all the world! Such has been the fact ever since the telephone became an everyday utility.