It's not as difficult as it sounds to actually write the next big hit. Most recent number one singles are musically extremely simple, sometimes utilising only four chords. Take Adele's Someone Like You, for example. Anyone who can play the piano knows how easy it is to play the accompaniment, and the vocals are extremely simple. So if complexity isn't the answer and if simplicity is definitely the way to go, what else do we need?

Firstly, it's wisest to start off with just a piano or guitar, so that you can work out some key riffs and melodies. Key signature is important because once you've picked one; you just have to play around creating melodies until you find one that sticks in your mind. You also need to be working on a chord progression to go underneath – this can help you create your melodies.

While you're doing this, you can also be trying to fix some lyrics into your song. Do the lyrics have a theme? An idea? A journey? Even a specific character? These are all things which can impact upon the feel of the chord progression and melody. If you're stuck for ideas, try writing about your own experiences. What has happened in the last year which has changed you? Are there any people in your life you want to thank?

Once you can play your song on the instrument of your choice, it's time for the fun part – introducing different sounds. This is where you can decide what genre of music you're going to win a Grammy in first. Just make sure you choose the right instruments for that genre.

With the decline of the honey bee comes many concerns: not only would we lose one of nature's most sublime treats, there would also be a destabilisation of our whole ecosystem. Bees are immensely important in their role of carrying pollen from one plant to the next as they move about collecting nectar to make their honey, but they've been struggling for a while now. Records show that their numbers have been decreasing in Europe since the 1960's, and it's not just Europe. This is a worldwide problem, so what is the solution?

Well Philips has come up with an idea which might encourage the trend of urban bee-keeping that has sprung up in our more populated areas. They have designed a conceptual beehive, in which the actual hive is encased on the inside of your house. In effect, the bees still have no direct access to the indoors but if and when you want a touch of honey on your toast or in your porridge, no need to go down to the shop, all you do is open the tap at the bottom of your hive and let the sweet golden viscose flow directly into your bowl! Philips design is modern and sleek and there is no proof that it will actually function in the practical way that they suggest, but it's a great idea. A glass vessel attaches to the inside of the window with a flowerpot on the outside. There is a passage between the two, through which the bees can move in and out of the hive. Inside the glass vessel, there are pre-fabricated frames ready for the bees to build their wax cells on. Orange glass filters the light, allowing the bees to see whilst also making it possible for us to peer into the hive and watch a colony at work. Finally, there is the tap at the bottom where the honey runs to which allows you instant access without even having to put on a glove.

One would think that people who invented complex equipment such as the radio, the airplane, the telephone and the electric light would have reaped the profits. However, it is a fact that inventors of simple, much-used and cheap to produce articles have made the greatest fortunes.

Devices that fulfil our need for a simpler, better and faster lifestyle and which contribute to our everyday comfort, convenience, and enjoyment of life have been the inspiration of inventors throughout the ages. When these inventions were patented and marketed properly they also contributed greatly to the wealth of the inventors.

Some of these simple and now indispensable inventions, which have made a fortune for the inventor, include airtight bottle caps, shoe-lace tips, the paper matchbook, the safety pin and the folding umbrella. All of these have made life much easier for the public and today we can't imagine how people managed without these items in the past.

But for every successful money-making invention there are hundreds that fail to make the grade. Many of these unsuccessful inventions have been patented correctly and even marketed properly and still fail. This can be for a variety of reasons – cost of manufacture, lack of originality, failure to work as advertised but the main reason for failure is a lack of demand or a failure to create a demand for the invention.

One needs to make the public feel that they need the invention, when previously there was no such awareness. Advertising and testing the market is now an essential cog in the very competitive field of inventions. There are literally millions of people who are working very hard to put their ideas and inventions to the test.

Marketing an invention needs to address the following factors:

There are other more complicated aspects to marketing an invention such as market saturation and economic climate, but once the inventor has done all his or her homework and protected the invention legally, there may be a small (or even large) fortune for the taking.

There is a saying that everyone has a novel in them. The following authors became famous for one novel and have never met the same heights since.

Mitchell grew up listening to stories of the civil war and had a penchant for reading history books. She wrote Gone with the Wind when she broke her ankle.

Gone with the Wind became the best-selling American novel of all time, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937, and inspired one of Hollywood's greatest films. To date it has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide.

Winsor wrote this epic saga of Restoration England while her husband was away serving in the military. The book was the original “bodice-ripper” and its reputation ensured that it became a best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic, particularly with war-weary British housewives seeking some escape from hardship.

Ellison wrote this pioneering depiction of African-American life in America. He was encouraged to do so by another noted African-American author, Richard Wright.

The main character in "Invisible Man", an African-American living in New York in the 1940s, has no name. It was symbolic of how the black community where, in effect, invisible to white society.

The novel won the National Book Award in 1953 and by the 1960s was hailed as one of the greatest works of American literature.

Metalious was born into poverty in the mill town of Manchester, N.H. She used writing as an escape from the drudgery and hardship around her. At age 30, she began writing her scandalous exposé of a fictitious town called Peyton Place in New England. Despite its reputation as trashy, it sold 60,000 copies in its first 10 days of publication and more than 12 million copies overall.

Nelle Harper Lee was the daughter of a local newspaper editor, attorney and political figure.

She found an agent who paid her a year's salary as a Christmas gift so she could take a year off from her job to write. She completed the first draft of "To Kill a Mockingbird" within a year and finished it in 1959. The novel was an overnight best-seller and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961.

Japan grocery stores are much smaller than in the US and therefore they need to utilise their space much more economically. Big round Watermelons waste a lot of space, so the ever resourceful Japanese came up with an ingenious solution – they would grow square watermelons. It sounds bizarre and implausible but, with a little bit of horticultural homework, it seems the solution was in fact very simple. All they did was place them into a square box when they were still growing and the watermelons obligingly took on the shape of the box.

Everyone was happy - the grocery stores saved money on shipping. Consumers loved them because they took less space in their refrigerators. Farmers who grew square watermelons got more orders.

There are some life lessons in this:

Don’t Assume: Just because something has always been a certain way doesn’t mean that it can’t change if the need arises. If you need to alter something in your life, there is always another way to do it if you apply some thought and effort. This approach will help break old negative habits and you will begin to form new habits based on well thought out processes. It’s an on-going process, but by doing this, you can consistently strive towards making every part of your life more enjoyable.

Be creative: When faced with a problematic situation, be creative by brainstorming for a solution. This often requires you to think outside the box (because the watermelon is in the box). Sometimes the simplest solutions are the most effective. Don’t intellectualise everything. Most people would have wasted years and probably a great deal of money on trying to genetically alter water melons to grow square. Being creative is something you can practise and fine tune. One creative thought leads to another, and eventually ideas build upon themselves.

Look for alternatives: Developing square watermelons was simply a way to make life more convenient, and this was because the shops had identified a problem and asked if it was possible to find a solution. What questions do you need to ask yourself regarding your life? Then explore the options to bring about change. But keep it simple and you will keep it effective.

Historically, women’s achievements in anything other than homemaking and raising a family have been largely ignored. Until the advent of the second World War, women, particularly married women, who had a job or even more appalling to the male ego, a career, or heaven forbid, a university education, were considered to be “blue stockings” and unfeminine.

However, women have made significant contributions to inventing and science. Some of the remarkable women whose revolutionary ideas changed the world include:

Martha Knight - 1870 patents a machine to produce flat-bottomed paper bags. She is also the first woman, in the United States, to fight a patent suit, and win. She defended her patent against a male inventor who had stolen her design and filed to patent it himself. He claimed that a woman couldn’t have the mechanical knowledge which is needed to invent a complex machine such as that.

Sarah E. Goode - 1885, born a slave in 1850, she was the first person to African American female inventor to obtain a patent. This was for her folding cabinet bed: a space-saver which was used as a desk when in its folded position.

Josephine Garis Cochran - 1889, invents the first working automatic dishwasher. At the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, Illinois, her invention was first shown, and eventually became associated with the KitchenAid Company.

Mary Anderson - 1903, of Alabama, invents the windshield wiper. Patented in 1905, windshield wipers became standard equipment on cars only a decade later.

Mary Phelps Jacob – 1914 invents the modern bra. She became fed up with restrictive corsets and was thus inspired to design a comfortable upper-body undergarment. Her brassiere was made from two silk handkerchiefs and a ribbon and became a popular choice for many women. After she patented the invention, she proceeded to sell it to Warner Corset Company.

Marion Donovan - 1950 invents the disposable diaper. Established manufacturers, however show little interest in her invention, so she starts her own company. Her company is called Donovan Enterprises. She sells this new company, along with her diaper patent, to Keko Corporation in 1951 for a remarkable one million dollars.oceeded to sell it to Warner Corset Company.

Bette Nesmith – 1951 invents Liquid Paper, this was a quick-drying, white liquid which you painted onto paper to cover mistakes. Nesmith was a secretary in Texas when she first thought of her invention, which became such a success that it, grew into the Liquid Paper Company.

Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper – 1952, U.S. naval officer and mathematician, invents the computer compiler. This invention revolutionised computer programming. She, along with her team, also developed the very first user-friendly business computer programming language, COBOL.

Most inventors put plenty of time, effort and money into the inventions which they hope will make them rich and famous, and change the world for the better. But what if the invention that you have painstakingly developed ends up killing you instead?

It happens… maybe not often, but it certainly happens.

Henry Winstanley was a famous English lighthouse architect. He constructed the first Eddystone lighthouse and had so much faith in it that he insisted on being inside it during a storm. The lighthouse collapsed. Winstanley and five other people perished.

Alexander Bogdanov was a Russian physician, science fiction writer, economist, philosopher, and revolutionary. One of his scientific experiments involved blood transfusion. Bogdanov made the decision to give himself a transfusion of blood which he acquired from one of his patients who suffered from tuberculosis and malaria. He became infected and suffered a horrible death.

Franz Reichelt was an Austrian tailor who designed a bizarre overcoat/parachute creation that he claimed could glide. He confidently decided to prove his theory from the first deck of the famous Eiffel Tower. In front of a group of interested spectators, he launched himself but, instead of gliding gently to the ground, he proceeded to fall straight down, dying on impact.

Thomas Midgley was an American chemist who invented leaded petrol and CFCs. He has, because of his inventions, come to be known as “the one human responsible for more deaths than any other in history”. His exposure to his inventions caused him to contract Polio and lead poisoning. Even whilst lying disabled in bed he could not quench his inventive mind, so he devised an elaborate system of pulleys and ropes to help lift himself from his bed. At the age of 55, after suffering strangulation by one of his ropes in pulleys, he died - impressively killing himself by two of his inventions.

Motivation is a driving force by which a human being achieves their goals. Motivation is built-in or extrinsic. One need to be motivated from various basic need in order to minimise physical pain and may be maximise pleasure, or it may also include specific need such as resting and eating, or a desired goal, even state of being ideal, or it may be attributed to less-apparent motives like selfishness, morality or may be avoiding morality.

Motivation can be categorised in two different categories one is intrinsic and the other extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is a motivation driven by an interest or enjoyment in the task itself, and it subsists within the personality rather than depending on any external force. 80% of student who are essentially motivated are likely to employ the task gladly as well as work to advance their skills, which increases their potential. For instance students are likely to be encouraged if they feature their educational results to factors within their own control and if they also believe that they have the skills that will permit them to be effective agents in achieving their desired goals. Another factor that will motivate them is being interested in mastering a topic, rather than just rote-learning to achieve good grade.

Extrinsic motivation is the presentation of an activity in order to attain an outcome; extrinsic motivation mostly comes from outside of the individual. If one wishes to make things happen the ability to inspire yourself is a very crucial skill. Be it at home, work or everywhere in between, most of the people use motivation to get positive results. Motivation mostly requires a delicate balance of communication, incentives and structure.

One of the essential ingredients to success is motivation. Motivation is defined as the driving force by which humans achieve their goals. For you to be able to achieve something, you need to have the drive that will keep you going. The first thing that you should have is self motivation. It comes from inside you and therefore you should not fail to make use of it always. You can make it because you have all it takes so you should not let go of it. With motivation, nothing will ever be impossible for you as everything will always work out.

You should focus on your goals. Your eyes should always be fixed on whatever you want to accomplish. This will enable you to overcome whatever challenges that you may face. This way, yourself motivation will be intact and with no time you will be an achiever. Most of the inventors that we now read about encountered challenges but in the end they did not always fail. In fact, nothing was invented without failing first. But they focused on what they wanted to make and that is why we are able to read about them and even use their inventions. You may be the next person that we will celebrate so stay focused on your goals and you will achieve.

If your heart tells you that it is too early for you to start working towards your success then you are mistaken. Thomas Edison, the man who invented bulbs, started inventing at an early age, as young six years old. It said that during this time he used to do experiments that at some point would be hazardous but he never gave up. When he was a teenager he had already established an electrical cockroach control system. This only shows that age does not matter when it comes to success. Many people wait until they are of middle age that is when they start thinking about doing great advances in life. This only shows how misinformed they are. In fact, the earlier you start working to succeed the better. As long as you know you can do something, why wait until it is too late?

At the age of 14 Alexander Graham Bell invented a rotary brush device that was used to remove husks from wheat. Through development this device has made the work of farmers easier and they celebrate him. Did you know that the person who invented the helicopter was only 19 years old? Igor Sikorsky only perfected it years later and that's why we are able to use the helicopters. Many of the great inventors that you always hear about started dreaming at a tender age. Therefore it is never too early to start working towards your dream. When you are young that is when you are energetic and therefore you will be able to do things better compared to when you are of old age.