Simon Sinek is probably best known for his book, Find Your Why.* He's a huge proponent of finding the work in life that really gets your blood pumping, the work that gets you excited, day after day. Here he is explaining that Orville and Wilbur Wright were underdogs when they made the first airplane flight.
In the last post, I explained my idea of what Creative Scenes are. They are small groups of people working together towards creative goals. It can be a group of people working towards separate goals, like a group of writers who all write their own books, but hang out together often, and bounce ideas and push each other to write and progress. Or it can be a group of people, like Orville and Wilbur Wright, and their friends, who work together towards a common goal. In this case, manned powered flight, creating a functional heavier than air aircraft.
Samuel Pierpont Langley was older, had engineering credentials, and had both the Smithsionian Institution and the War Department backing him to create the first true airplane. But the two bike shop owners from Dayton, Ohio, got their plane to fly first. Simon Sinek makes the point that why people come together for a project can have a huge effect on whether or not something truly innovative comes out of it. Great teams, with a common vision and drive, can often succeed where well funded, but less creatively motivated teams may not.
Orville and Wilbur Wright, and the friends that helped them, were a small creative scene that kept working, failure after failure, until they finally were successful at flying their airplane in 1903. They changed the course of history, and created the aviation industry that exploded with new innovations throughout the 20th century and beyond.
*Not a paid link.
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