Page 117 - Wake Up and do Your Thing

NICHOLAS BOOTHMAN
cloth and strengthened them with rivets. John Kimberly and Charles Clark had a crazy idea: a soft tissue paper to remove cold cream. Bill Gates had a crazy idea: to put a computer on every desk.
Today you can eat a sandwich while you boot up Windows in your Levi"s and wipe the ketchup off your fingers with a Kleenex—because these crazy ideas created jobs for countless millions and built considerable fortunes for their originators.
The digital era was shaped by a handful of crazy ideas that changed our lives, like online check depositing, Apple watches and drones. At first everyone laughed at them because they seemed ridiculous—until they made them happen, then there was no stopping them. Pop culture is full of stories about people with crazy ideas that turned out to be amazing. Michael Dubin disrupted the shaving world with the Dollar Shave Club and six years later sold it for one billion dollars. J.K. Rowling went from struggling single mom to the world's most successful author. Sara Blakely was invited to a party and wanted to look her best in a pair of white pants. She had a crazy idea. She took a pair of scissors and cut the feet off of a pair of tights. She loved the way the new undergarment made her look and spent the next two years and $5,000 of her savings traveling to numerous clothing manufacturing plants up and down North Carolina in the name of research. Before her thirtieth birthday, Blakely made the very first prototype for
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