One of the cardinal sins of dreamstopping is pigeonholing: putting ourselves in a limited space and failing to see our other possibilities. Of course, if you were going to be pigeonholed, there are worse spaces to be boxed into than Hollywood movie star and sex symbol. That’s the space Hedy Lamarr occupied in the 1930s and 40s.

Lamarr was a stunning dark-haired Austrian-born actress who later became an American citizen. She captivated directors as a 19-year-old in the 1933 Czech film Ecstasy, and within a decade was capturing plum roles opposite Hollywood’s top leading men. Billed as “the most beautiful woman in the world,” she even wound up playing the ultimate Biblical seductress in director Cecil B. DeMille’s lavish 1949 production Samson and Delilah.

But Lamarr was surprisingly ambivalent about her looks. “Any girl can be glamorous,” she said once. “All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.”

Lamarr was anything but stupid. Own a cell phone? Surfing over a wireless Internet connection? You can thank her. While listening to her companion, composer George Antheil, play piano, Lamarr came up with the idea for the “spread spectrum” technology behind those inventions and more than 1,000 others. In 1942, she patented her brainchild for transmitting signals over continually changing frequencies in a pre-arranged pattern to avoid jamming or intercepting. It was first used by the U.S. military during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and is the foundation for today’s Mistar satellite communications network.

So no matter how you view yourself—or how others see you—never give up the idea that you can be more.