Member-only story

The Eureka Moment Myth

Greg Satell
5 min readJun 22, 2019
Image: Canva

In 1928, Alexander Fleming arrived at his lab to find that a mysterious mold had contaminated his Petri dishes and was eradicating the bacteria colonies he was trying to grow. Intrigued, he decided to study the mold. That’s how Fleming came to be known as the discoverer of penicillin.

Fleming’s story is one that is told and retold because it reinforces so much about what we love about innovation. A brilliant mind meets a pivotal moment of epiphany and — Eureka! — the world is forever changed. Unfortunately, that’s not really how things work. It wasn’t true in Fleming’s case and it won’t work for you.

The truth is that innovation is never a single event, but a process of discovery, engineering and transformation, which is why penicillin didn’t become commercially available until 1945 (and the drug was actually a different strain of the mold than Fleming had discovered). We need to stop searching for Eureka moments and get busy with the real work of innovating.

Learning To Recognize And Define Problems

Before Fleming, there was Ignaz Semmelweis and to understand Fleming’s story it helps to understand that of his predecessor. Much like Fleming, Semmelweis was a bright young man of science who had a moment of epiphany. In Semmelweis’s case, he was one of the first to realize that infections could spread…

--

--

Greg Satell
Greg Satell

Written by Greg Satell

Co-Founder: ChangeOS | Bestselling Author, Keynote Speaker, Wharton Lecturer, HBR Contributor, - Learn more at www.GregSatell.com

No responses yet