David McCullough is one of the best history writers of all time and he recently passed away . He’s written the stories of the building of the Panama Canal, the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, the biography of American presidents like John Adams and Harry S. Truman. My favorite McCullough book is on The Wright Brothers who are known as the pioneers of aviation in our country.

McCullough tells the story of the brothers studying aviation and trying to figure out how to make things fly. The Wright brothers began to study birds of every kind- eagles, snow-white gannets, hawks, pigeons, buzzards, etc. McCullough notes that Wilbur Wright spent hours studying these birds movements in the wind and filling a notebook with his notes and drawings.

In one of his notebooks Wilbur wrote, “All soarers, but especially the buzzard, seem to keep their fore-and-aft balance more by shifting the center of resistance than by shifting the center of lift.”

As the Wright brothers were studying these birds the local people had a hard time figuring out these men.

One local named John T. Daniels said, “We couldn’t help thinking they were just a pair of poor nuts. They’d stand on the beach for hours at a time just looking at the gulls flying, soaring, and dipping,” He went on to say, “They would watch the gannets and imitate the movements of their wings with their arms and hands. They could imitate every movement of the wings of those gannets; we thought they were crazy, but we just had to admire the way they could move their arms this way and that and bend their elbows and wrist bones up and down and which way, just like gannets.”

Orville Wright went on to say, “Learning the secret of flight from a bird was a good deal like learning the secret of magic from a magician.”

The Wright Brothers had to watch and imitate the thing that they were trying to replicate.

Perhaps all innovation is just a form of imitation.

Birds had found a way to fly through the air, humans had not. The Wright Brothers had to learn from birds and people thought they were nuts.

The next time you step on to a plane think about this…the origin story of that airplane is two brothers standing on a beach watching birds fly and then imitating their movements while people laughed at them. The airplane is the most influential invention of the 20th century. The question I am asking myself is what influential invention are we missing today because we haven’t found (or aren’t willing) to look for the bird to imitate?

Inspiration always proceeds learning.

This story motivates me to look for inspiration in all of the ordinary things (like birds) that I come across each day and wonder what can I learn from that thing and apply it to make the world better like the Wright Brothers did.