Ever have THAT IDEA that’d gonna make you rich? I had this one over the summer of 1999.

Made sketches, thought about it for a few months, did searches for the same, but didn’t find it – IT WAS UNIQUE — until October 1999.

That’s when I saw this: Filed June, 1999: PRECISELY the same idea I had. Like, absolutely no different. I was broken. How could this guy, Toshihiro Shimizu have MY IDEA filed in the patent office FOUR MONTHS BEFORE ME?

IMPOSSIBLE! But here it was. I looked at my book of drawings and notes. Physical pain as I was all ready to put all my eggs into this one basket and make the $millions. It wasn’t to be.

I had to pull a lesson from it but it was hard. And one day it hit me and it was a big relief: For every good idea you have, there’s 1000 other people in the world with that same idea. It’s “of the times” and it’s ok that they have the same idea as you because you have the same idea as them. Since then I’ve looked for those “other people” in the world who thought like me about different things. Not always easy but I keep at it.

Vehicle drive assist system

A vehicle drive assist system comprises a camera for picking up an image of an area existing in an advancing direction of a vehicle; display means for displaying the image picked up by the camera; steering angle detecting means for detecting a steering angle for steering the vehicle; traveling path predicting means for predicting a traveling path of the vehicle on the basis of the steering angle detected by the steering angle detecting means; and drive assist means for overlaying on the display means drive assist information containing the vehicle predictive traveling path predicted by the traveling path predicting means and guide lines prolonged from the lines defining the width of the vehicle body on the image of the area existing in the vehicle advancing direction.