Prompt:
Think carefully about the issue presented in the following excerpt and the assignment below.
The old saying “Don’t reinvent the wheel” means that it is foolish to spend time and effort to come up with something that already exists. In facing an urgent problem, for example, we should simply use a solution that has already proved to be effective. However, some people would argue that, like the original stone wheel, existing ideas, solutions, and products need to be improved or even reinvented.
Assignment:
Is it foolish to develop or improve an idea or product that already exists? Plan and write an essay in which you develop your point of view on this issue. Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your reading, studies, experience, or observations.
Response:
Ideas and products inevitably become old and even if they are still useful, there is always something better in their capacity. Throughout history and in several literary works ideas have shown themselves to be capable of betterment. To evolve is to be fit and to be fit is to survive.
Take for instance, the availability of music. One of the first devices to make music accessible to the general populace was the gramophone. By the 1920’s, every household had one. Its structure was simple, you could have everyone in the house enjoying the music. But what if they didn’t? What if someone didn’t like listening to music or preferred to hear a different record? Of course, even in today’s time undoubtedly one could make do with a gramophone. The problem, after all, was not very big. But it was there, nonetheless. So, the gramophone was replaced by the stereo. What followed was a quick succession of CD players, the Discman, the Walkman, and, of course, the i-pod. Every model better than the last, made to cure the smallest of inefficiencies. Clearly, what lies between the gramophone and mp3 players is not mere distance, but a chasm and who would argue, that it is not for the better?
In a similar vein, Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple inc, believed that the foundations of any company should be based on improvement, in fixing the smallest of glitches, in perfecting every little detail until finding something, anything , wrong with a piece of equipment becomes a challenge. While the i-pod was being made, Jobs main objective was to create an object so small that it was hard to believe, it was capable of storing 5000 songs. Every time the creative team brought him an iPod, his response was “make it smaller”. Finally, when the team found it impossible to make the iPod and smaller, they told jobs that it defied the laws of physics to engineer anything smaller as they simply could not fix the parts into a space and smaller because there wasn’t any space left. Jobs picked up the iPod walked over to an aquarium in his office and dropped it in. He then pointed at the air bubbles that rose out of it and said “Make it smaller!”.
This shows that the limit to which an existing product can be pushed and the i-pod became the best-selling music device in history, This suggests that it is nit in fact, foolish to improve an existing idea because were it not for improving on our inventions the human race would not stand where it does today.