#132 Edwin Land (Steve Jobs's Hero)

What I learned from reading The Instant Image: Edwin Land and the Polaroid Experience by Mark Olshaker.  ---- [1:42] The word “problem” had completely departed from Edwin land's vocabulary to be replaced by the word “opportunity”.  [2:01] What was it about this man and his company that allowed such confidence and seeming lack of concern with the traditional top priorities of American business?  [2:38] There is something unique about Polaroid having to do both with the human dimension of the company, and with a unity of vision of its founder and guiding genius.   [3:36] Perhaps the single most important aspect of Land's character is his ability to regard things around him in a new and totally different way.   [4:14] Right from the beginning of his career Land had paid scant attention to what experts had to say, trusting his own instincts instead.   [4:49] Land has always believed that for any item sufficiently ingenious and intriguing, a new market could be created. Conventional wisdom has little capacity with which to evaluate a market that did not exist prior to the product that defines it.  [5:21] He feels that creativity is an individual thing. Not generally applicable to group generation.  [5:52] Land is a man deeply caught up in the creative potential of the individual.  [6:33] An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.  [7:43] Apple founder Steve Jobs once hailed Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid and the father of instant photography, as "a national treasure" and once confessed to a reporter that meeting Land was "like visiting a shrine." By his own admission, Jobs modeled much of his own career after Land’s. Both Jobs and Land stand out today as unique and towering figures in the history of technology. Neither had a college degree, but both built highly successful and innovative organizations. Jobs and Land were both perfectionists with an almost fanatic attentiveness to detail, in addition to being consummate showmen and instinctive marketers. In