NaBloPoMo #12: Inspiration

As I was driving in to work this morning, I was racking my brain trying to think about what I would blog about today. Then, as I was about to turn into the street where I park, I saw this 
sign:

And I remembered an article about Oliver Smithies, who won the first Nobel Prize at UNC in 2007, and it said: 

"There stood Linus Pauling, the future winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and the Nobel Peace Prize, when a young Oliver Smithies, an undergraduate at Oxford in the 1940s, became so enamored with the presentation that he decided then and there to dedicate his life to biomedical sciences. Nearly seventy years later, when Oliver Smithies won his Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, he knew exactly what he wanted to do with his prize money: fund an annual symposium to bring Nobel laureates to UNC to inspire students." 

Research can be tedious, slow and frustrating. Weeks or even months of feeling like you are taking one step forward, two steps back can make you lose sight of the big picture and instead focus on the day to day grind. But signs like the one I saw today are a reminder that over time, years even, the work we do can add up to something pretty amazing. 

Inspiration can come from within us or from around us, if we just take the time to stop and look.