BENGALURU: Thomas Edison’s life story is one worth reading about. Part visionary, part gambler and part genius, he was a brilliant inventor who made the best use of his time on the planet. Though he had only six months of formal schooling, he had reach such classics as The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by the time he was eight and invented the phonograph, which captured sound on records, by the time he was thirty.
A master of positive thinking, when someone asked him why, during his last years when he was almost totally deaf, he did not invent a hearing aid, he replied, “How much have you heard in the last twenty – four hours that you couldn’t do without?” He then added with a smile, “A man who has to shout can never tell a lie.” But what I remember the most about his special man was his rare ability to thrive on only four hours of sleep.
“Sleep is like a drug,” he explained. “Take too much at a time and it makes you dopey. You lose time, vitality and opportunities.”