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About Us
Okay, Me First
This site is operated by James E. White, a marketing consultant, inventor, publisher, and, of course, webmaster who has been self-employed since 1991. But, just because it's "my" site doesn't mean others cannot participate. If you would like to contribute information, with or without credit, your input would be welcome--provided, of course, you're not in the business of taking advantage of the naivete of the average wannabe inventor. For more on contributing see the Suggestion Box page. For more about me you can see the info posted at a couple of of my web sites: WillItSell.com and Taletyano Press.
While I've had, as MOST PEOPLE DO, invention ideas all my life I'd never attempted to commercialize any until recently. I started down that path by being a marketing consultant. When my mentor suggested I find a product I could take national my brain started working. Then a few days later I happened* on a notice in the local paper about an inventors club meeting. I went looking to find the perfect new product. I was appalled! The, excuse me, IDIOTS** at the meeting were focusing on the technology and failing to look at the marketplace and even basic business considerations. Anyway my outspoken feedback at subsequent meetings started me on a long chain of steps that got me to here. While I've offered to help a couple of club members with viable inventions, even as low as a 20% commission and I pay my own costs up-front***, I still have not gotten that elusive "product to take national." Hence, of necessity (or so you could say), I created my own invention, the Pendant Positioner.
My Invention (the one I'll tell you about anyway:-)
If you'd like you can also sneak a peek at my current invention, the CurliqueTM Pendant Positioner pages at www.inventorhome.com/inventions. While I had high hopes of getting that invention to market fast I've run into a little snag with manufacturing. This year (2004) I intend to get that worked out! (Ya gotta have goals!) Of course the patent process once started grinds inexorably on regardless so the patent should issue probably in June or July 2004 just depending on how fast I and the PTO process paperwork (always paperwork!).
The Footnotes
* Those notices of local inventor club meetings, BTW, had been appearing monthly for all the 3 years I'd been reading the paper---I just hadn't noticed them before. The real danger though is that anyone who has just had an idea will, instead of tripping over a monthly inventor club meeting notice, stumble first across one of the DAILY ads (radio, TV, yellow pages and that have been present for years) of a firm promising (or so it seems) to take their invention idea and make them rich. If the inventor sees their sudden "discovery" of an ad as "a sign" I can practically guarantee they'll be shorn of $11,000 and their pride before, in 3-5 years, they acknowledge they goofed.
** Everybody behaves like an IDIOT, including me, from time to time but wannabe inventors are more prone to the problem than most. Why? Because an idiot is someone who behaves foolishly and a person behaving foolishly is a person showing a lack of judgement. And what wannabe inventors do is fall head-over-heels in love with their inventions--and the process of perfecting it--to the total exclusion of seeing the OBVIOUS (to everybody else at least) such as BETTER solutions are already on the market or it's not a viably commercializable product because, duh!, it will cost more than prospective buyers are willing to pay. Lack of judgement, i.e., idiocy, sends more wannabe inventors into oblivion than all other causes combined. Of course the inventor MAY be right in seeing something everybody else has overlooked ("Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." Lord Kelvin, British mathematician, physicist, and President of the British Royal Society, c.1895) but far more often, say 99.97% of the time, it is the inventor who is missing the obvious.
*** Another thing I've discovered about the hundreds of UNSUCCESSFUL inventors I've encountered in the last 4 years is they want all the money for themselves! But of course they want your--and everybody else's help too. And by "help" they generally mean "you do the work for me and, since it was my idea, I'll take the credit and the money."
A Note About Attitude
You'll find the attitude throughout this web site (and my other web sites as well) to be one of "I'm right and you're wrong (before you've even had a chance to speak!) and therefore I'm going to teach you what's right and what's reality so listen up." That attitude is not accidental (in fact it made my wife, a physicist and college professor, a bit nervous). The bottom line is that my experience and that of many others dealing with (i.e., trying to actually help) wannabe independent inventors is that less than 2 out of 1000, LESS THAN 2 out of 1,000, will actually accomplish anything---even fewer will succeed. At least 90% of you reading this--including you--don't have the intellect(1) or knowledge(2) to succeed and WON'T be willing to change that even though you could. Of the remaining 10% at most half will have a chance at succeeding. My writing "attitude" may very well "turn off" 90+% of you readers--and that concerns me but I'm not going to lose sleep over it--but more importantly it may help move some significant percentage of that half of the 10% that currently don't have a chance at succeeding over into the other half (or now more) that do. And if it goads 1 or 2 of the 90% to take the action necessary to get to success then that's just a bonus. The intelligent and eager to learn often find my attitude refreshing, informative, and even amusing and those are the people I can help, the rest are a write-off--they started reading this web site as a loser and they will quit reading it as a loser. I wish it weren't so but that's the facts.
And Speaking of Losers
Loser, in this context, means one who would like to succeed as inventor but HAS NOT--yet! (At the moment that still includes me, of course.) The great thing about being a "loser" in this game though is that it is NOT like Wimbldon, or the Indianapolis 500, or selection as MVP where only 1 can come out the winner; in the inventing game everyone who plays can eventually come out a winner without relegating anyone else to second place at best.
More Footnotes
(1) Intellect is a funny thing. While it's often said that humans on average use only 10% of their brains studies of brain function, physiologically, clearly show that is not true. What really happens is that people are just too lazy to think. They let someone tell them what to think and what the "facts" are and, unfortunately, once those "facts" and thoughts are in there they wholly accept them as correct and BLOW OFF all evidence that what's emplanted in their brain is wrong. Take the following little true/false quiz about things you probably learned in grade school:
- Patents are valuable?
- The government verifies that patented inventions work?
- Ideas can be patented?
- A patent gives its owner the right to make, use, and sell their invention?
- A patent protects an inventor against infringers?
Got your answers all recorded? No cheating now! Of course all of the above are simply false. Okay, you just BLEW OFF that fact that they were all false. See what I mean. Still, they ARE all false. But I'm not going to go through any fancy footwork to prove they are. I challenge you to study this web site, my other web sites, and many of the web sites these sites link to, maybe even read a book or two, until you do understand why each of the above is false. The fact that you don't yet understand why they are false means, simply by definition, that you are ignorant--i.e., not knowledgeable--on the subject addressed by the questions. I'm personally ignorant of many things, large numbers of which you probably aren't.
(2) There is knowledge, then there is "knowledge," then there are ignoramuses. Knowledge, is, of course, the actual facts that have managed to make their way into your brain over the years. But if you know anything at all you KNOW that there are far more facts that you DO NOT have available in your brain. "Knowledge" is the pseudo facts that you have rattling around in your brain or, as has been attributed to Will Rogers: "It's not the things we don't know that get us into trouble; it's the things we do know that ain't so." Of course nobody likes to be called an ignoramus but all it really means in essence is a lack of knowledge but we generally reserve the title for not only one who is ignorant but one who choses to CONTINUE to be ignorant in favor of "all they do know that ain't so." Ignorance is a FIXABLE problem and once you fix that the ripple effect of adjusting your facts and thinking to more correct versions WILL, slowly but certainly, improve your overall intellect.
Web SitesJames E. White also maintains and can be contacted through the following web sites:
www.willitsell.com Free information on the invention process used by successful inventors. |