Dearest Darling Friends,

1. Post-it wasn’t invented, it was noticed.

2. ⁠Cornflakes was not a research driven product, it was a ‘wealth out of waste’ idea.

3. ⁠Saccharin was born out of curiosity about small things.

4. ⁠Safety glass was curiosity born from an accident.

5. ⁠Pacemaker was a mistake that revealed an extraordinary possibility.

6. ⁠Viagra was meant to be a pain killer till its side effect was noticed. The side effect became the product.

• Post-It Notes. Spencer Silver made a glue too weak to be useful. Fry a colleague, sang in his church choir, and his paper markers kept slipping out of the hymnal between Sundays. He noticed it was ideal for a hymnal bookmark that wouldn’t fall out. And Post-It was born. Not invented. Noticed.

• Cornflakes. Will Keith Kellogg left cooked wheat sitting out, then rolled the stale dough anyway and got flakes. He and his brother John were working at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, looking for an easily digestible food for patients. “Waste was the raw material.” Cornflakes was not invented. “How to use this surplus that will be throw away?” Curiosity to prevent wastage led to a breakthrough product..

• Saccharin. Constantin Fahlberg noticed his bread tasted sweet and traced the reason to his own fingers. He was working in a Johns Hopkins lab at the time, and the compound he was working on turned out to be hundreds of times sweeter than sugar. “He got curious about the small thing in his life.” So sweet, isn’t it?

• Safety glass Édouard Bénédictus dropped a flask that cracked but held together, thanks to a plastic coating. The flask had held a plastic solution that dried into a thin film inside. That film is what kept the shards in place. An accident led to a revolution in the world of safety.

• Pacemaker. Wilson Greatbatch installed the wrong resistor, and the circuit pulsed like a heartbeat. He had been building a device to record heart rhythms, and the first human implant of his design came a few years later, in 1960. “The mistake was only a mistake until someone listened to it.”

• Sildenafil. Pfizer was testing it for chest pain, and the side effect became the product. The research took place at Pfizer’s lab in Kent, England, and the drug reached the market as Viagra in 1998. “The trial failed at its purpose and succeeded at something else.”

In the hurry burry of life, do pause and notice.

Notice things that are of no use. You might be able to find one.
Notice things that are surplus. You might create wealth out of it.
Notice things that are sweet. They might add a lot of sweetness to your life.
Notice what does not break. They might help you to become strong.
Notice the side effects of good things. They might make you a remarkable product the whole world wishes to have.