Duc Pham, chance professor of engineering, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Birmingham
I am not into games and am certainly not referring to the eponymous card game that you sometimes see people play by themselves on long train or plane journeys. However, in the spirit of the approaching festive season, I have created another single-player game of patience for readers of this column. All will be revealed shortly.
First, let me take you back almost 25 years to an open lecture by Terry Matthews OBE, at the University of Wales Cardiff. The event was organised by my then head of school, the late Prof David Vernon Morgan, FREng, FIET, FLSW, who had a natural talent for attracting megastar speakers to the institution.
Sir Terry, as he is known today, is Wales’s first billionaire serial high-tech entrepreneur, having “founded or funded over 100 companies in the high-tech communications field1.” His lecture was hugely inspiring, and forever imprinted in my mind are the three secrets to his success, namely hard work, focus and perseverance. Granted, these are more truisms than secrets, but people often overlook them in their quest for that magic success formula. I have extolled the virtues of hard work and focus in previous issues of CMM2, 3. This issue’s column is about the third quality, perseverance.
The history of engineering is replete with cases of inventions that would never have seen the light of day had it not been for their inventors’ perseverance. Notable examples include Thomas Edison’s incandescent lightbulb, which was only realised after more than 6,000 unsuccessful trials4, and James Dyson’s vacuum cleaner, which went through 5,127 prototypes before going into production5.
A quality at the heart of perseverance is, of course, patience, a commodity that is, alas, in rather short supply in modern, frenetic times. Many students now want instant knowledge without investing much effort. Management expect instant results without providing adequate resources. People demand an instant solution to Brexit without extensively and objectively analysing benefits and costs.
This brings us to the aforementioned game. As a young boy, whenever I showed signs of impatience, my tutor would make me copy the word “patience” a hundred times. I have typed “patience” in the various native languages of my laboratory members repeatedly and in no particular order below. Any time you feel impatient, start attempting to count how many words there are in each language. After every count, quietly chant “Pitmos,” for example, “Patience 1, Pitmos,” “Patience 2, Pitmos,” “Pazienza 1, Pitmos,” etc. You will obviously be wondering what “Pitmos” means. Well, that is something for another issue—patience!
www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/mechanical-engineering/index.aspx
References1Terry Matthews (2019). Wikipedia. Available at: http://bit.ly/2Q8zwy5
2Pham, D. (2011). What manufacturing companies can learn from the martial arts. CMM, volume 4, issue 3.
3Pham, D. (2015). The seven “F”s of leadership. CMM, volume 8, issue 2, p.26. Available at: bit.ly/2Kf0aBM
4Edison’s Lightbulb [web page]. The Franklin Institute. Available at: bit.ly/2X5UYW1
5James Dyson (2019). Wikipedia. Available at: http://bit.ly/36W9eoF