The Surprising Power of a Single Blinking Light
Letter Zero.55
Dear friend,
Did you catch the story about my latest camera invention this week? I stripped the innards out of an old Polaroid camera and replaced them with a receipt printer, a Raspberry Pi, and an E-ink display. If you check it out, do me a favor and give my story a clap or maybe even link to it in your social media tool of choice. You’d make my day.
But as I fiddled with my camera experiments, I made a discovery that I wanted to tell you about...
A single blink from a tiny light shouldn’t be able to give you such a thrill. But when you are teaching yourself to build electronic gadgets, an ordinary LED can give you a big dopamine hit. The reason is that electricity is invisible. It takes a light or a buzzer to verify whether your mental model is matching reality. You wire everything up the way you think it should be and then hope that light glows when you turn the power on. Observers will only see someone getting way to excited about a blinking light. But it’s not about the light, it’s the idea that matters. And you just received proof that this thing is going to work.
Writing is similar, you put your ideas on the page hoping that when people read them, something will resonate. You never really know if the light will turn on. Sometimes it doesn’t. When the light doesn’t come on have you failed? No. In the words of Edison, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Never stop experimenting.
I’ll write again soon. Stay creative.
Your friend,
Adrian