When was the last time you went looking for adventure, not searching for “anything in particular”, and with little or no expectations of what you would find or where you would end up? This week’s Imagination Hat honors the work of Dr. Alexander Fleming, a very left-brained individual that, fortunately, for us, also had a right-brained sort of mind. Dr. Fleming discovered penicillin on this day in 1928.

He didn’t start back to work the day after his vacation planning to discover Penicillin. He was just going about his normal work with his normally very curious mind. And he had a very messy lab to clean up. In the corner, there sat an untidy stack of petri dishes that had gotten contaminated while he was away, with “stuff” growing on them, a mold of sorts. If it had been just a normal day, spoiled experiments would have been swept into the garbage. Might I say most scientists would have done that. But not Dr. Fleming. Thank God he was a curious man, and today was no different. He was ever searching for answers and conducting tests to help patients, and especially the soldiers of WWI, to recover from infected wounds. (Antiseptics were doing a great job of killing bacteria on wounds, but they were also wiping out the patients immunological defenses). These petri dishes contained experiments that he had been conducting on staphylococci. He noticed something very different about this mold–it was inhibiting the growth of the bacteria. It certainly wasn’t what he expected to see, but he had discovered things by accident before. Though it was many years and many experiments later that penicillin was available for the general population, his work began the development of modern antibiotics. And he won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1945.

Many people miss revelation because it isn’t what they are expecting to see.  Dr. Fleming did not close off his mind simply because things did not fit nicely into a prescribed pattern of how he expected science to be or how things had fallen out before.

Want to be more creative? Learn to ask more questions and allow yourself to be more curious. Open your mind to impossibilities. Creativity begins with curiosity.Creativity begins with curiosity.

That is this week’s Imagination Hat!