Thomas Edison — "Hell, there are no rules here—we're trying to accomplish something."
Hell, there are no rules here—we're trying to accomplish something.
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More from Thomas Edison
"My main purpose in life is to make money so that I can afford to carry on more experiments."
"I am a good listener, but I also have a great deal of patience."
"The world is full of people who are always waiting for someone else to do something about their problems."
"To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk."
"The chief function of the body is to carry the brain around."
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Understanding this quote
What it means
When you're genuinely trying to create something new, obsessing over rules gets in the way. This is a call to prioritize results over rigid process. Rules maintain existing systems—but innovation by definition disrupts them. If you're locked into how things are done, you'll never discover how they could be done. Real accomplishment demands the willingness to ignore the established playbook and move forward despite uncertainty.
Relevance to Thomas Edison
Edison ran Menlo Park, history's first industrial research lab, as an anti-bureaucratic workshop where teams tried thousands of approaches without formal methodology. His 10,000-plus attempts on the light bulb filament embodied this exactly—no rule said a viable filament existed, but he pursued it anyway. He hired scrappy tinkerers over credentialed academics and famously slept in his lab. Ignoring conventional constraints wasn't a pose for Edison; it was his operating system.
The era
Edison spoke during America's Gilded Age, when industrialization was rewriting civilization faster than institutions could respond. Electrical engineering had no established rulebook—nobody had lit cities with incandescent bulbs before. The late 1800s celebrated self-made men who built empires from scratch, and regulatory frameworks barely existed. In a culture already upending centuries of convention through railroads, telegraphs, and factories, Edison's rejection of rules was the defining spirit of an era making itself up as it went.
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