I grew up with Chitty-Chitty-Bang!-Bang! so naturally I was infatuated with the idea of invention. I remember in grade school thinking the 16 color crayola box was amazing… until the 32 color box came out. Then the next year an amazing box of 64 came out, with a little built-in sharpener! I was sure that my life’s purpose was to invent a new crayola color. My dad is a scientist and ex-Navy guy so I also grew up with model HO scale trains, planes, ships and Estes rockets… and with the idea of experimentation. Our street in Boulder, CO was at the top of the hill. I wondered why my bicycle handlebars would turn so far and so easily when the bike was stopped, and turn so hard and so little when I was going fast. I resolved to myself that I would try forcing the handlebars to turn at the bottom of the street, because it would be so cool to turn tightly like a fighter plane, to go around the corner. I still have the scars on my knees from that experiment.
Regardless of numerous failures over a lifetime, I have always believed in my heart that “there must be a way”, no matter the challenge, and it was only a matter of finding it. It helps, too, to be very lazy and to rationalize spending hours and hours dreaming up a simpler way of doing some menial chore that might have taken five minutes of concerted effort. I think I drove my poor dad crazy.