Imagination

By rather serious minded people it is often called cloud gazing or staring at your belly button. They say, your imagination will not get you anywhere. It is a waste of time. You need to pay attention and stay focused.

Perhaps those very same people have not ever heard of inventors like Thomas Edison or the Wright brothers. The Wright brothers gave us the ability to travel across the country in just a few hours. Edison invented hundreds of different things including the light bulb, the phonograph, the motion picture camera,the voting machine and nickel-iron batteries, just to name a few.

Other people with great minds have used their imagination to take those ideas and turn them into things that we use everyday. Cellphones, movie theaters, cd players and rechargeable batteries would not be if not for people who came after Edison looking at the world and imagining how they could make it better. Without imagination we would not have many of the modern conveniences that people are so strongly attached to. Things that we often take for granted are the direct result of people who dared to dream of a better way.

People used to believe that the world was flat and if you sailed too far you would just fall off. If not for Christopher Columbus and other like minded dreamers there would likely have never been English colonists settled on the east coast of what we now call America. Christopher Columbus believed that the world was round. He could imagine it even though so many in his day could not. He believed that he had sailed around the world to India which is one of the reasons why native Americans are called Indians. It turns out he was right about the world being round, he just hadn't sailed far enough to reach India.

If certain people living in America had never suffered under the harsh tyranny of the English king and imagined a way to make things better, the United States of America would never have been created. We would still be a colony under British rule. If the leaders of our newly forming country had not used their imaginations to compare the life they had with the life they wanted, the Declaration of Independence could not have been written and neither could the Constitution.
Every successful business started out at one time as a vision in the mind of the potential owner of such a business. And what is a vision but a fully fleshed out plan that one imagines.

Nothing worthwhile ever gets done without first there being a plan formed in the imagination of the one who ends up doing that worthwhile thing. It is important to note however that imagination alone is not enough. One must also have the passion, the drive to see through the plan that they have dreamed up.

Dreaming is the key to unlocking our power of creativity. Imagination, backed up by personal action is how we transform the world we have into the world we want. So, while listening to a lecture may not be the most appropriate time to daydream, I say to you, ignore those who say that imagination is useless. It is in fact one of the most useful tools with which a person can be equipped.