Edison's real wisdom here isn't that hard work beats talent—it's that he's giving permission to be ordinary. Most people assume genius arrives like lightning, which excuses them from trying. But Edison is saying the moment of brilliance is almost incidental; what matters is the unglamorous slog of testing filaments for hours, failing again and again until something works. A software engineer I know spent eighteen months refining an algorithm that looked simple once finished, but those months of incremental debugging and dead ends were the actual genius, not the five-minute insight that started it all.