Thomas Edison — "There's a way to do it better - find it."
There's a way to do it better - find it.
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More from Thomas Edison
"I have a theory that the human voice is immortal. It is a form of energy that never dies. It just changes form. I believe that we can record the voices of the dead and play them back."
"I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day."
"The first thing is to find out what the world needs; then proceed to invent it."
"I am not a spiritualist, but I am a firm believer in the fact that we can communicate with the beyond. I believe that we can build a machine that will allow us to hear the voices of the dead."
"I am not a believer in the theory of evolution. I believe in the theory of creation. I believe that God created the world and everything in it."
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Whatever method you're currently using, a superior approach exists somewhere, and your job is to discover it. This is a call to relentless improvement, rejecting the idea that any current solution is final or optimal. It pushes against complacency, demanding active searching rather than passive acceptance. The phrasing treats better methods as certainties waiting to be uncovered, not possibilities that might exist, making innovation an obligation rather than a luxury.
Relevance to Thomas Edison
Edison embodied this through his Menlo Park laboratory, famously testing thousands of filament materials before settling on carbonized bamboo for the light bulb. He held 1,093 US patents, each representing iterative refinement over existing technology. His phonograph, motion picture camera, and electrical distribution system all replaced cruder predecessors. Edison rejected theoretical elegance for practical experimentation, running his lab on trial-and-error persistence, which directly mirrors this quote's demand for active searching rather than settling.
The era
Edison worked during the Second Industrial Revolution (1870s-1910s), when electricity, telegraphy, and mass production were transforming daily life. Competition between inventors was fierce, with Tesla, Westinghouse, and Bell racing for patents and market dominance. American industry prized practical improvement over pure science, and Edison's quote captured that national ethos. Venture capital, industrial laboratories, and the patent system rewarded whoever built the better version first, making continuous refinement economically essential, not merely philosophical.
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