Reflection on “Creativity and invention”

 

It has long been said that necessity is the mother of invention, this is quite apparent in the case of Richard Turere, a 13 year old Kenyan boy who was charged with taking care of his father’s herd. His herd as well as many other herds have long suffered from attacks from lions and so Richard, driven by a need to protect the herd that is his family’s livelihood, attempted to think up a solution to keep the herd safe that did not involve him staying up all night to do so. (You could say that laziness also has a hand in the making on new inventions)

At first Richard tries to keep the lions away by lighting torches since he assumed lions would be scared of fire, however that did more harm than good. Undaunted by failure he tries a new approach, he builds a scarecrow to trick the lions into thinking he is up and guarding the herd, this keeps the lions fooled for a day before they catch on. So the day after he takes a torch and starts walking around the shed where the herd was being held and he noticed that the lions seem to stay back, as though they were afraid of the moving lights and there came his brilliant idea.

He set up a circuit with a few lights and an old car battery lying around that would cause various blinking lights to go on and off a certain intervals scaring the lions off, and it worked! And this idea spread far and wide throughout Kenya giving Richard some fame and landing him a scholarship in the best school in Kenya.  The moral here is that, had Richard given up after his first or second ideas hadn’t worked, he would never have reached what he has to day and he would not be taking the first steps to what we can hope to be a bright future, and so a person should never give up and should always be willing to think up creative solutions for their day to day problems because who knows where things will take him from there.