Segway scooter inventor Dean Kamen freely admits it: He often suffers sleepless nights wrestling over whether to quit a project that’s not panning out.
“You end up lying there saying, ‘I’m not stopping. It would be an act of shallow cowardice. Or you decide to quit and you say, ‘This is one of those ideas that just isn’t going to work,’ ” said Kamen, speaking by phone from his home office in Manchester, New Hampshire.
When to quit — said Kamen, also the inventor of health care technologies and the Slingshot water purifier — is “the toughest question there is” for any entrepreneur who survives on creativity and instinct.
“It’s not nearly as glamorous as people think to keep working on something and to keep hitting roadblocks and to keep going,” he said.
Kamen, who works hard to inspire future innovators with his FIRST program to promote high school math and science, said every entrepreneurial innovator he’s ever seen shares a few characteristics.
“It’s not that they’re brilliant or well-educated,” Kamen said. “They work all the time. They don’t let failure demoralize or destroy them. They pick themselves up and keep going and eventually, every once in a while, one of your ideas actually breaks through and works, and it makes all that stuff seem worthwhile.”
Photo by DEKA Research & Development Corp..