remake her home, her family
relations, her domestic happiness, her
outside career. The trouble is that we
do not usually trust this inner urge to
create. We haven't any confidence in our
own ideas--because they are our own.
Maybe you think this is not true in your case. But stop and review some of your experiences. Don't you often look at some device or plan or fabrication that somebody else has made and see a better way of doing it? Don't you sometimes know there is a better way, and aren't you sure it could be worked out if more time were given to it? Don't you frequently believe you could build a house, run a school, launch a business, sail a boat, play bridge, raise radishes--anything whatever that happens to interest you--better than somebody else you see doing it, if you only had time to gain the requisite fundamental information with which to equip your creative impulses?
And haven't you had the experience of thinking of what seemed momentarily a good idea; then discarding it because it was your own and so couldn't be worth much--and soon after finding that somebody else had conceived the selfsame idea, used it, put it over successfully, and reaped the profits and the credit that might have been yours? And how cheap you felt, when all you could say to yourself was "I thought of that first. Why didn't I do it?"
I know a man who had the idea for the internal-combustion engine--gasoline engine--long before it was put on the market, but who never got round to
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