Alchemy - any magical power or process of transmuting a common substance, usually of little value, into a substance of great value.
Iterate - to develop (a product, process, or idea) by building upon previous versions or iterations, using each version as the point of departure for refinements and tweaks:
Stephen Key of InventRight related the following story to me:
"Now this is many, many years ago on Friday night. I was watching Dallas on Friday night. I'm sitting on this couch and someone, was sitting there next to me and took a piece of nylon or, and took a little piece of cotton and sculpted a little face out of, out of nylon. I guess it was soft sculptures, what it was, and it was a cute little face and I thought, wow, that's really cute. And I thought, let me try that. So I made a face too, and I thought it was really kind of clever. I just started making things out of women's nylons and cotton, and I would sell funny faces.
And then I took them out to, I guess a little arts and crafts festival at the local elementary school.
I had a little table, I brought everything I made and it was, it was a country. It was up in the Hills of Los Gatos, California. And I wanted to sell my little creations.
You've seen people do that before. Right. And my father showed up later that day at the very end of the day. Cause I told him I wanted to make things and sell them and he showed up and he said to me, um, how'd you do? And I said, well, I did fantastic. He goes, well, how many did you sell? And I said, well, I didn't sell any.
He kind of looked at me kind of funny, but he could tell, like I liked it. I liked the people and it was my first time trying to sell something. So, you know, you make mistakes and I did, but I went back out, later and then I changed my designs a little bit and they started to sell. So I sold things at street fairs, county fairs, state fairs, wherever I could set up a table for about five years that I made everything myself and learned a lot about designing things quickly and they didn't sell, kick it to the curb because in order to pay the rent, you have to come up with something someone wanted."
It is rare in life that our first draft ends up being the successful final product or bestseller but if we keep on refining and iterating we can often come up with a winning product!
Stephen Key learned the power of Alchemy at an early age but more importantly, he also learned how to iterate!
