When I was in my 20s and floundering around, I became inspired by the life of Buckminster Fuller. For the few today who know anything at all about the man who was once on the cover of Time magazine, it is usually that he was the inventor of the geodesic dome. You see it still here and there — those triangular playground climbing structures, as tops of buildings, as homes, and as buildings themselves.What most people don’t know is that for the first 32 years of Bucky’s life, he was a complete failure, flunking out of Harvard twice (the second time was my favorite — he spent his entire semester’s tuition on a night out in New York with nine showgirls!), failing at several businesses, and so on.
He turned everything around once he realized that his mistakes were his greatest asset.
If he could learn from his mistakes, he theorized, and help as many people as possible in the process, he just might become a success. He decided to make his life an experiment, to see what one man could do to improve the world by learning from his mistakes. In the end he became a scientist, architect, mathematician, poet, author, inventor. In fact, he had the longest entry ever in the history of Who’s Who.
Photo by jffm.
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