In any field of endeavor, it is impossible to make a significant contribution without first being strongly influenced by past achievements within that field.Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the statement

Many of the people who are attempting to make a significant contribution are someway or other influenced by the past attempts. Those past attempts could be either successful or failures. For if the past attempts had been successful, the people have a tendency to look back at how those great things were achieved and learn from them and even apply some of the learning to their own attempts. In the field of science, the scientist read about the past work, consult all the literature there is available on their field of study, and create new ideas and techniques based on the past work.

In the field of sports too, the records help make a positive reinforcement for the athletes to perform even better than their predecessors and break their records. For some writers and artists, reading and analysing earlier work helps them to think of new ideas and acts as a source of imagination for them, so they could combine different ideas and works to create a more beautiful literary work, a poem, or even a mesmerising portrait.

If the past attempts have been failed, those also help influence the present workers, to take note of them and not do the same mistakes and learn from their failed attempts about why did they failed. Like when a scientist attempting to create a new device fails, that will only help the next generation to learn from his failure to successfully create that said device.

But there may be scenarios where nothing has been done earlier, there has been no attempt either successful or failure, to influence anyone, there the success can come from individual’s thinking ability. There was no attempt to create anything like iPad before Steve Jobs came up with his own, he was not influenced by any of the past achievements, as there were none, it was his total brilliance and original thinking that brought such a great device in this world. For many artists like Picasso or Michelangelo, and for some of the great writers like Shakespeare or Dickens, it was their own imagination that those marvellous pieces of literature and art came into existence.

For those who are the first one to attempt to take an endeavour, don’t have any influence, they create the fields for others, so that they could get influenced from their work.