People imagine inventions begin with a flash of genius. My sixteen patents began somewhere far less glamorous: with problems that refused to leave me alone. I went from nuclear power plant engineering to custom home building to health seeking, and at every stop I kept encountering tools that did not exist — so I built them. Looking back across all sixteen, the honest summary is this: the engineering was never the hard part. What the patents actually taught me was persistence, and those lessons apply to anyone carrying an idea they cannot stop thinking about.
Lesson One: The Problem Chooses You
The best inventions rarely come from hunting for a good product idea. They come from being the person who feels a problem so personally that a workaround becomes a prototype. My health equipment exists because my own health demanded it — I needed a near infrared sauna that an ordinary person could set up in a bedroom corner, a way to restore a neck curve I had flattened at an engineering desk, air worth breathing while I slept. The market never asked me for any of it. My life did.
I watched the same pattern shape my father before me. He never set out to be in the tube-bending business — he set out to fix his own awning problem, and the fix turned out to be something other people needed too. When aspiring inventors ask me where to find ideas, I tell them to stop looking outward. Inventory your own persistent irritations. The problem that has been bothering you for years, that you have already half-solved with duct tape and stubbornness, chose you a long time ago.
Lesson Two: The Patent Is a Process, Not an Event
My first application cured me of the notion that a patent is a moment. It is a correspondence — a years-long exchange of claims, rejections, amendments, and refiled arguments with an examiner whose job is to say no until you have earned the yes. The first office action rejection stings like a verdict. It is not one. It is the opening of a negotiation, and the inventors who lose are almost never the ones with weak ideas — they are the ones who read a rejection as an ending.
Sixteen patents later, I treat the process the way I treated quality documentation in nuclear power: methodical, unhurried, assembled to survive scrutiny. Claims drafted narrow enough to defend and broad enough to matter. Prior art searched honestly, before the examiner does it for you. Every response filed on time, every time. None of that is inspiration. All of it is persistence with a filing calendar.
Lesson Three: Commercialize or It Is a Certificate
A patent nobody manufactures is an expensive piece of wall art. This lesson cost me the most, because the work that follows the grant — sourcing, tooling, testing, packaging, listing, shipping, supporting — dwarfs the invention itself, and no one applauds any of it. The certificate says you invented something. Only the customer says you built something worth inventing.
Every product I hold a patent on, I also manufacture and sell. My testing gets done on my own body first and my own equipment gets used in my own home daily, which means every complaint reaches someone with skin in the game. I would rather hold six patents that became real products than sixty that became framed paper — and when I mentor first-time inventors, commercialization is the conversation we have before we ever discuss filing.
Lesson Four: Persistence Is the Actual Skill
Talent starts projects; persistence finishes them. Between my first sketch and a customer’s doorstep there is a valley of prototype failures, supplier disappointments, examiner rejections, and evenings when quitting is the only reasonable option on the table. Sixteen trips through that valley taught me that the feeling of wanting to quit is not information about the idea — it is just weather. It passes, and the work is still there, and the only question that matters is whether you pick it back up.
My father wired a clubhouse on poles as a boy because nobody told him he could not. I filed patent responses at a kitchen table after full workdays for the same reason. Persistence runs in families partly by blood, I suspect, but mostly by demonstration — someone shows you that ordinary people simply keep going, and after that you have no excuse.
Lesson Five: Protect the Idea, but Spend Your Fear Wisely
New inventors spend enormous energy fearing theft and almost none fearing the actual killer, which is obscurity. Yes — document your work, understand what a provisional application buys you, file before you publicize. I do all of it. But in sixteen patents’ worth of experience, no one ever stole an idea of mine as effectively as hesitation did. The market punishes the unbuilt idea far more reliably than any infringer, and a patent you spend so long protecting that you never launch has protected nothing but your excuse.
What I Tell Inventors Who Are Where I Started
The same conversation happens in every mentoring session, so here it is in one paragraph. Your idea is probably good enough; that was never the question. Build the ugliest version of it that works and put it in a stranger’s hands this month. Write down what breaks. Fix it and repeat. File intelligently when you have something worth claiming — my story of the whole journey is in Invent It and Be Your Own Boss, and the full portfolio this article draws on lives on my Patents & Inventions page. And when the valley gets long, remember that the inventor you are comparing yourself to also stood in it — she just kept walking.
What Sixteen Actually Bought Me
Not what people assume. The licensing yacht never materialized — that fantasy dies around patent number two for most of us. What the portfolio actually purchased was compounding credibility and a self-reinforcing ecosystem: the sauna equipment, the posture-restoring devices, the air and water technology all solve neighboring problems for the same person, so each product introduces customers to the next and every patent strengthened my hand in conversations with suppliers, retailers, and copycats alike. The sixteenth filing was easier than the first not because the examiners softened but because I had stopped being intimidated by the machinery.
The unexpected dividend was teaching. Sixteen trips through the full arc — problem, prototype, prosecution, production — turn into pattern recognition you cannot buy, and mentoring first-time inventors through their single trip has become some of the most satisfying work I do. Their first office action rejection lands on my desk with a panicked email attached, and I get to say the sentence I needed someone to say to me at the start: this is the process working, not the process ending.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do you need an engineering degree to invent?
No. You need intimacy with a problem and the stubbornness to iterate. My engineering background made me faster at documentation and tolerance analysis; it did not supply a single one of the sixteen ideas. Some of the best inventors I mentor are nurses, farmers, and parents — people close enough to a problem to feel its exact shape.
How do I know if my idea is worth patenting?
Ask the commercialization question first: would you personally spend two years bringing this to market? If not, a patent will not fix that. If yes, search the prior art honestly, build the prototype, and let a real user’s reaction — not a relative’s politeness — tell you whether the claim is worth drafting.
What did your first rejection feel like?
Like failing an exam I had studied years for. What changed my trajectory was learning that nearly every issued patent in the building was rejected first. The rejection is the process working, not the process ending — I now read office actions the way I read a punch list: items to resolve, not verdicts to accept.
Should I file before I have a prototype?
Understand the trade: filing early protects a date; prototyping early protects you from patenting the wrong thing. My pattern across sixteen filings settled into prototype first, provisional when the design stabilizes, full application once real use has proven the claims I actually need. Your sequence may differ — but never file on a design you have not held in your hands.
What separates the inventors who make it?
They finish ugly versions. Everyone else polishes imaginary ones. After sixteen patents and decades around inventive people, that is the entire secret, and it is learnable — persistence is not a personality trait, it is a practiced skill with a filing calendar attached.
