Category: Inspiration

He built a guitar from a fence post in his garage—and accidentally invented the sound of rock and roll. Today marks what would have been the 110th birthday of a man whose name you might not know, but whose inventions you’ve heard in every song you’ve ever loved.

June 9, 1915. Waukesha, Wisconsin. Lester William Polsfuss was born into a world where music still meant orchestras, pianos, and acoustic instruments that could barely be heard past the third row. Electric amplification was science fiction. Recording studios didn’t exist. The idea that one person could layer their voice or instrument multiple times on a single track? Impossible.

Young Lester didn’t know he was supposed to accept those limitations. As a teenager in the 1920s, while other kids were playing baseball, Lester was in his garage building his own amplifiers from radio parts and telephone components. He taught himself guitar by listening to records and slowing them down to figure out how the notes worked. When existing guitars couldn’t produce the sounds he heard in his head, he started taking them apart and rebuilding them.

His neighbors thought he was strange. His mother worried he’d electrocute himself. He was just getting started. By the 1930s, performing as “Les Paul,” he was playing jazz clubs and radio shows. But he had a problem: acoustic guitars were too quiet. Even with a microphone, they got drowned out by drums and brass. And the hollow-body electric guitars that were starting to appear had their own issue—they fed back and howled when amplified too loud.

So in 1941, working in his garage in Queens, New York, Les did something that seemed absurd: he took a 4×4 piece of solid railroad pine—basically a fence post—attached a guitar neck to it, mounted some pickups, and connected it to an amplifier. It looked ridiculous. Musicians laughed at it. He called it “The Log.”But when he plugged it in and played, something magical happened. The sustain was incredible. The tone was clean. No feedback. No unwanted vibrations. Just pure, amplified sound that could cut through any band and sustain for days. The Log was the first true solid-body electric guitar. And it sounded like the future.

For years, Les tried to convince guitar manufacturers to produce it. They all said no. A solid chunk of wood with strings? That’s not a guitar. Nobody would buy it. In 1952, after rival Leo Fender released the Telecaster and started selling solid-body electrics successfully, Gibson finally approached Les Paul. They asked him to help design and endorse their version of a solid-body guitar. The Gibson Les Paul was born.

Today, it’s one of the most iconic guitars in history. Jimmy Page played one. Slash plays one. Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Gary Moore, Randy Rhoads—some of the greatest guitar moments in rock history came from that instrument. And it all started with a fence post in a garage.

But Les wasn’t done revolutionizing music. In 1947, he married Mary Ford, a brilliant singer and performer. Together, they started having hit records in the 1950s—”How High the Moon,” “Vaya Con Dios,” songs that sold millions of copies and topped the charts. But something about those records sounded… different. Impossible, actually. Mary’s voice would harmonize with itself. Multiple guitar parts would interweave in ways that shouldn’t be possible for one person to play. The sound had depth and dimension that no one had heard before.

Here’s why: Les Paul was inventing multitrack recording in his home studio. He built his own 8-track recorder by stacking tape machines and synchronizing them. He pioneered overdubbing—recording one part, then playing it back while recording another part on top of it. He developed tape delay effects. He invented close-miking techniques. He experimented with phasing and reverb. Every single one of those techniques is standard in every recording studio today. Every pop song, every rock album, every podcast uses methods Les Paul invented in his garage in the 1940s and 50s.

The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper”? Built on Les Paul’s techniques. Every hip-hop track with layered samples? Les Paul’s multitracking. That guitar solo that gives you chills? Probably played on a Les Paul guitar, recorded using Les Paul’s methods.

In 1988, Les Paul was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a performer. In 2005, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for his technical innovations. He’s the only person ever inducted into both. Think about that. Celebrated equally as an artist and an inventor. A musician who could hang with the best jazz players in the world, and an engineer who held multiple patents for audio technology. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s permanent exhibit about him calls him an “architect of modern music.” That’s not hyperbole. That’s exactly what he was.

Les Paul kept performing until he was 93 years old, hosting a weekly show at a jazz club in New York City where legends would drop by to jam with the man who’d invented the tools they used. He died August 12, 2009, at age 94.

But here’s the thing about Les Paul: he never really left. Every time you hear a power chord ring out at a concert, that’s The Log—his fence post guitar—echoing through time.

Every time a singer records harmonies with themselves, that’s Les in his garage, figuring out how to layer tape tracks. Every time a guitarist bends a note and lets it sustain into infinity, that’s the solid-body design he pioneered.

Most people who shaped the 20th century did it through politics or war or wealth. Les Paul did it from a garage in Queens with a soldering iron, a 4×4 piece of wood, and an unshakeable belief that if he could imagine a sound, he could build a way to create it. He proved that you don’t need a laboratory or a corporation or a fancy degree to change the world. You just need curiosity, determination, and a willingness to look ridiculous building a guitar out of a fence post while everyone tells you it’ll never work.

Today would have been his 110th birthday. The best way to celebrate? Turn on any song you love. Listen to the layered vocals. The sustaining guitar notes. The way each instrument occupies its own space in the mix. That’s all Les Paul. That’s his gift to every person who’s ever loved music.

Happy birthday to the man who taught us that innovation doesn’t happen in boardrooms—it happens in garages, at 2 am, when someone who refuses to accept “impossible” decides to build the future with their own hands.

…what could you perfect if you spent time perfecting tasks in your field?

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Some people have an inclination to help, often to their own detriment. This can come about because they, as some put it, “don’t know how to say no.”

Here are a couple of responses I heard recently that may be of assistance to help politely avoid making harmful commitments.

If someone wants you to do or agree with something that you have reservations about or perceive is not in your best interests, one handling is to respond with, “That doesn’t work for me.”

If someone pushes you to do something you do not agree with or understand, or want to think through the ramifications or need external advice on, something you can say that is not a straight up no is, “Let that sit with me for a while.”

“Do the difficult things while they are easy and do the great things while they are small. A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” – Lao Tzu, Philosopher (604 – 531 BC)

“Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.” – Arthur Schopenhauer – Philosopher (1788 – 1860)

Look carefully at this photograph from 1902.

The elderly woman staring back at you was born in 1792—when George Washington was still President of the United States, when the guillotine was falling in Revolutionary France, and when the entire concept of photography wouldn’t be invented for another four decades.

Her name was Margaret Ann Neve, and she would become one of the most remarkable humans ever documented.

When Margaret entered the world on the island of Guernsey in 1792, King George III ruled Britain, Napoleon was a young military officer, and the 19th century hadn’t even begun. She grew up in a world lit by candlelight, traveled by horse and carriage, and communicated through handwritten letters that took weeks to arrive.

But Margaret wouldn’t just witness one century—she would conquer three.

As the decades rolled forward, Margaret watched the world transform around her in ways no generation before had ever experienced. She saw the Industrial Revolution reshape society. She witnessed the rise and fall of empires. She lived through the invention of the telegraph, the railroad, the telephone, and finally—remarkably—she sat still long enough to have her photograph taken.

Margaret didn’t spend those 110 years in isolation, quietly waiting for time to pass. She lived.

Alongside her sister Elizabeth, who herself would reach 98, Margaret traveled extensively across Europe—an extraordinary feat for women of their era. In 1872, when Margaret was already 80 years old, the sisters made their final grand journey together to Kraków, then a vibrant city in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Their mother had lived to 99. Longevity ran through their family like a genetic gift, but Margaret took it further than anyone could have imagined.

On April 4, 1903, Margaret Ann Neve passed away at 110 years and 321 days old. When she died, she held two records that seemed almost mythical: she was the first verified woman ever to reach 110 years of age, and only the second person in recorded history to do so.

But her most astonishing achievement? Margaret Ann Neve remains the first documented human being to have lived in three different centuries.
Think about that for a moment. She was born in the 1700s, lived through the entire 1800s, and made it into the 1900s. She began life in the Age of Enlightenment and ended it in the Age of Innovation.

When she was born, people traveled by horse. When she died, they were on the verge of flying.

Margaret’s story is more than a footnote in record books—it’s a window into the breathtaking pace of human progress. It reminds us that a single lifetime can span worlds, that one person can serve as a living bridge between eras we think of as impossibly distant from each other.

Her photograph, taken just a year before her death, captures something profound: a woman who saw everything change, yet remained herself throughout it all.

Margaret Ann Neve didn’t just survive 110 years.

She witnessed the birth of the modern world—and carried the memory of one that no longer exists.