Useless Inventions Led This Inventor to a Life of Enthusiasm

Simone Giertz has a very unusual profession. She is an extremely successful inventor of useless things. As she states in her Ted Talk, “The easiest way to be at the top of your field is to choose a very small field.”

Giertz likes to take everyday problems and create “useless” humorous robotic solutions. Due to her fear of public speaking, her hands tend to shake, so she designed a cumbersome and absolutely impractical invention to serve the water to her.

During the talk, Giertz showed the audience an email that she sent to her brother in 2007 when she was still in school, “You won’t understand how difficult it is for me to tell you, to confess this…” Giertz explains to the curious crowd that the event leading up to this dramatic email was receiving a B on a math test. She was a great overachiever and put an unnecessary amount of pressure on herself.

On her successful YouTube channel, you can see plenty of videos of her making fun of herself, and in the process, she seems to be having a great time. She is exercising creativity, making the most incredible, original inventions, and making millions of people all over the world laugh.

“As much as my machines can seem like simple engineering slapstick, I’ve realized that I have stumbled on something bigger than that,” she says. “It’s this expression of joy and humility that often gets lost in engineering, and for me, it was a way to learn about hardware without my performance anxiety getting in the way.”

Despite her success on YouTube, people often ask her if she will ever build something useful, to which she has the perfect answer: “the way I see it, I already have because I’ve built myself this job. And it is something I could never have planned for,” she tells the audience.

“Instead, it happened just because I was enthusiastic about what I was doing and I was sharing that enthusiasm with other people. To me, there is a true beauty of making useless things because it’s this acknowledgment that you don’t always know what the best answer is, and it turns off that voice in your head that tells you that you know exactly how the world works.”

It is clear that Giertz’s videos inspire others to let go of their fears and expectations, and just enjoy themselves. She inspires people to ask questions and come up with creative answers.

“And maybe a toothbrush helmet isn’t the answer, but at least you’re asking the question.”

Giertz has inspired millions to let go of their fears, pursue their passions, and share them with the world. We can’t wait to see what whacky invention she comes up with next.