“The three things that are most essential to achievement are common sense, hard work and stick-to-it-ive-ness.”
Thomas Edison

Common sense, hard work, and persistence: Edison is a guy who knew a lot about all three of these qualities. He barely went to school, was almost deaf, was dismissed by his teachers as being stupid, held knockabout jobs as a young man, and lost his entire factory and its contents in a terrible fire very late in life. And yet, look at all he accomplished as an inventor and creative genius: the phonograph, the light bulb, moving pictures — the list goes on and on.

So when Thomas talks, I listen. He’s a guy whose opinion I value a lot. That’s why, when I came across this quote tonight, I decided to ponder it from the point of my pen. As writers, it’s abundantly clear that the three “must haves“ Thomas cites totally apply to us.

Common sense: As writers, we need this to keep myself on an even keel. We have to be practical yet also listen to our intuition and not get sidetracked or blindsided. We need to use our inner compass to guide us.

Hard work: Well, there it is in black-and-white. There’s no getting around it. Anything worth doing is going to demand tons of time and energy. If it were easy to do, everyone would do it. Hard-easy is the way to go. Once you put in the hard work to do what you want to do, the rest is easy.

Stick-to-it-ive-ness: „Never, never, never give up!“ Winston Churchill said it and Thomas demonstrated it in spades. It took him 10,000 failures to find the right ingredients for the light bulb. He saw each failure as a step on the road to success. Can we bring that same persistence to the page?