First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently

by Gallup Press

In 1666, Isaac Newton closed the blinds of his house in Cambridge and sat in a darkened room. Outside, the sun shone brightly. Inside, Newton cut a small hole in one of the blinds and placed a glass prism at the entrance. As the sun streamed through the hole, it hit the prism, and a beautiful rainbow fanned out on the wall in front of him. Watching the perfect spectrum of colors playing on his wall, Newton realized that the prism had pried apart the white light, refracting the colors to different degrees. He discovered that white light was, in fact, a mixture of all the other colors in the visible spectrum — from dark red to deepest purple — and that the only way to create white light was to draw all of these different colors together into a single beam.