INSPIRATION
↳ Dennis Gabor

Dennis Gabor was a Hungarian-born electrical engineer who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1971 for his invention of holography, a system of lensless, three-dimensional photography that has many modern applications and held over 100 patents for his work.

Gabor began his life-long love of physics at the age of 15 when he and brother George built a small lab to experiment. After serving with the Hungarian artillery in the last months of the First World War, he went on to study engineering instead of physics at university because: “Physics was not yet a profession in Hungary, with only six university chairs, and who could have been presumptuous enough to aspire to one of these?”

After fleeing Nazi Germany in 1933, Gabor worked in England, where he maintained he was an engineer and inventor rather than a scientist. He was also a humanist devoting much of his time to study the future of our industrial civilization on which he published, among others, the book Inventing the Future, from where the quote above is taken.

Gabor’s belief about the future remains a mainstay among innovators including Chief Atari scientist Alan Kay whose maxim was “Don’t worry about what anybody else is going to do… The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” and Harvard M.D. and MIT Engineer Peter Diamandis who holds as a motto “The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself.”

A serious mismatch has developed between technology and our social institutions…inventive minds ought to consider social inventions as their first priority.
– Dennis Gabor

ACTION
↳ 3-Step Plan To Unlock Your Inner Inventor

❶ Get Clarity
When building a vision, don’t just spend time on defining what your DO want, be sure to get give thought to what you DON’T want. Excluding can just as important to refining your plan.

❷ Embrace Optimism
Visualize what this new future looks like and sense how you’re feeling when you do. You are what you think you are, same goes for your future, so keep it positive.

❸ Fail Through
As any inventor knows, failure is part of the process and essential to learning. Navigate through the bumps, and recover through the falls as best as you can.

❹ Bring Others Into Your Future
Reach forward to find missing links, then reach back and throw a line to others this new future might benefit. Explore every opportunity to connect, co-create and forge a new road together.