As humanity we all seek to answer five questions. Who am I? Where am I from? Why am I here? What can I do and where am I going? My focus in this article is on the question of, What can I do? And to answer that I’d like to share a story.

Edwin H. Land was born on May 7, 1909 in Bridgeport, Connecticut. His mother was Martha Land, and his father Harry Land was a landowner and prosperous scrap-metal dealer. As a boy, Land was fascinated by light. In particular, he was drawn to the natural phenomenon of light polarization.

In 1926, Land enrolled at Harvard University to study physics, but his desire to conduct research caused him to leave after only a few months in search of more practical opportunities. He moved to New York City, where he studied physical optics independently at the New York Public Library and conducted experiments secretly at Columbia University. There, he worked to develop a synthetic polarizer.

Six years later in 1932, Land and George W. Wheelwright III, his former Harvard physics lecturer, established Land-Wheelwright Laboratories in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to manufacture polarizers. The company’s inexpensive polarizers were used in photographic filters, glare-free sunglasses, and stereoscopic products that gave the illusion of three-dimensional (3-D) images. The company was renamed Polaroid Corporation in 1937 and thus the word Polaroid was born and entered the dictionary.

In 1943, during a vacation in Santa Fe, Land took a photo of his daughter, Jennifer, who was then three years old. The girl asked her father why she couldn’t see the photo right away—at the time, photographs had to be developed professionally, a process that often took several days. Land was immediately taken by the concept of instant photography and set off on a long walk to think through the idea. Within an hour, Land had visualized the camera, film and chemistry system that could accomplish this feat. A little more than three years later, on February 21, 1947, Land demonstrated an instant camera and associated film to the Optical Society of America. Called the Land Camera, it was in commercial sale less than two years later. Polaroid originally manufactured sixty units of this first camera. Fifty-seven were put up for sale at the Jordan Marsh department store in Boston before the 1948 Christmas holiday. All fifty-seven cameras and all of the film were sold on the first day of demonstrations.

Beyond this single remarkable invention, Land produced other transformative technologies such as the sheet polarizer, and he contributed broadly to federal research activities during World War II and the following decades. Over the course of his career Land earned 535 patents. For his scientific and business achievements, Land was admired by scientists, corporate leaders, and government officials alike.

As it stands Edwin H. Land was the innovative inventor responsible for conceiving of and perfecting instant photography. Known simply as Polaroid, the system revolutionized traditional photography by compressing darkroom processes into an integrated film unit and producing a final photograph in the seconds following the click of a camera shutter.

Designed To Produce

The story of Edwin H. Land sheds light on how one can answer the question, ‘what can I do?’ To answer this question, you must start by looking at your design. By design I mean all your traits, abilities and aptitudes that frame who you are. Woven into your identity are the threads of your potential. Potential is determined by the design of something. The bird can potentially fly, the fish can potentially swim, and you? Your potential is intricately woven into your design and your design is crafted so that you produce according to your seed.

To produce is to create or manufacture from components or raw material. As an individual your raw material is your seed. In following the paths of his interests, Edwin H. Land produced in the field of photography and the field of polarized light. But before he produced, he cultivated a couple of seeds.

Two Seeds

The seed is the source. It is where you begin. In every productive process, there is a continuous cycle of the seed producing fruit which has seed in it to produce more fruit. As an individual, you have two seeds that start the productive process; seed-ideas and seed-talent.

1. Seed-Ideas

The first seed you posses is that of ideas. It is widely presumed that an idea arises in a reflexive, spontaneous manner, without thinking or serious reflection. As true as that might be there’s more to ideas than a sudden flash of inspiration.

An idea is simply a new combination of old elements. The capacity to bring old elements into new combinations, depends largely on the ability to see relationships. To a mind which is quick to see relationships several ideas will occur.

To produce ideas, knowledge must be consumed and eventually emerge in the form of fresh, new connections. For example, Edwin Land’s experiments were built on those of the British chemist and surgeon William Herapath. Furthermore, Land’s research and experiments were a body of knowledge within him from which he saw patterns that led to combinations and a formation of new ideas. Land went on to say that, “It was as if all that we had done in learning to make polarizers, the knowledge of plastics, and the properties of viscous liquids, the preparation of microscopic crystals smaller than the wavelength of light, the laminating of plastic sheets, living on the world of colloids in supersaturated solutions, had been a school both for the first day in which I suddenly knew how to make a one-step dry photographic process and for the following three years in which we made the very vivid dream a solid reality.”

2. Seed-Talent

The second seed you possess is talent. Your talent is your innate abilities. It is the ways in which you most naturally think, feel and behave. Operating in the strength of your talent is what will set you apart.

Don Clifton highlighted five clues that help direct people to talent in his 1992 book Soar With Your Strengths. These five clues to talent are Yearning, Satisfaction, Rapid Learning, Glimpses of Excellence and Total Performance Excellence. Lets look at each clue in turn and see the role it played in the life of Edwin H. Land.

Yearning. This is the pull or attraction to one activity rather than another. In other words, if you had an entire week off your calendar, what would you spend your time doing? In Land’s case it was his passion for doing experiments. Land made sure that he performed an experiment each day. He literally could not sleep when he found an experiment that was trying to tell him something.

Satisfaction. It is rare to find pleasure in places we don’t also find strength. It is important for you to pay attention to individualized intrinsic motivation, the activities or opportunities that you genuinely enjoy. To help learn what gives you satisfaction, take note of “What sorts of activities do you finish and think, ‘I can’t wait to do that again’?” Elkan Blout, a close colleague of Edwin Land at Polaroid, wrote: “He was a brilliant, driven man who did not spare himself and who enjoyed working with equally driven people.”

Rapid Learning. This clue deals with the way you are naturally wired to learn and often shines in activities you execute naturally but struggle to breakdown into steps for others. According to biographer Peter Wensberg, once Land could see the solution to a problem in his head, he lost all motivation to write it down or prove his vision to others. While at Harvard University, Land’s wife would often have to extract from him the answers to homework problems, at the prodding of his instructor. She would then write up the homework and hand it in so that he could receive credit and not fail the course.

Glimpses of Excellence. This clue is often detected more by others than yourself. For Land, his talent was seen and made known to him by other students in high school. His yearbook photograph comes with the caption “Ed is some star in his studies and we are sure that he will make a name for himself and Alma Mater in college”. He graduated with honours from the Norwich Free Academy.

Total Performance Excellence. The Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls it “Flow,” and describes the optimal state of intrinsic motivation. This is when you find that time seems to disappear when you’re doing certain things. During his time at Polaroid, Land was notorious for his marathon research sessions. When Land conceived of an idea, he would experiment and brainstorm until the problem was solved with no breaks of any kind. He needed to have food brought to him and to be reminded to eat. He once wore the same clothes for eighteen consecutive days while solving problems with the commercial production of polarizing film.

Creativity: The Master Key

In order to produce, you must engage in the creative process by cultivating your seed ideas and your seed talents. This means committing to honing your craft and sticking with it long enough.

It’s much easier to garden than to hunt. It takes time to build a garden: you need to work and tend to it but it will produce food every year. But most of us just go out and hunt – hoping that we’ll find something straight away but there is never any guarantee. The key is to start planting your seeds now that you can enjoy later.

Each one of us has something unique to offer, therefore we must chart our path to producing from our own seeds of ideas and talent.