I may be the engineer in the family, but my wife is the inventor.

Being an engineer is easy. You go to school to learn well established laws and methods. When you get a job, there are others who can mentor you and show you the ropes. If you need to know more, there are training classes to take. Someone else, usually marketing, decides what needs to be to be designed. All you have to do is follow the rules.

Being an inventor is hard. There is no school for inventing, nobody to teach you the ropes, and no classes to tell you how to do things. You come up with your own idea that has never been done before. You learn on the fly what you need to know from a variety of domains you know nothing about. You build it yourself. There is no such thing as first pass success. Experimentation and refinement are a constant process.

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