New Ideas Require More Persuasion Than Brilliance
The cavemen up the trail had discovered this thing called “fire.” Keeps you warm, gives the steak a nice flavor—but there’s a catch. Leave it unattended and it lays waste to your meadow. Hmmm, think we’ll leave it for now. If we’re cold, we can always just wear another fur—without destroying where we live. I like to imagine the challenges faced by an early fire influencer. Given everything we now know about humans, there is not a chance in hell that the discovery of fire didn’t have some pushback.
Most of history’s greatest innovations were a tough pill to swallow at first. Western Union roared with laughter at A. G. Bell’s telephone invention. Harry Warner of Warner Bros. fame bellowed, “No one wants to hear actors talk.” Einstein’s E=mc2 theory was the giggle of the town. Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s page ranking ideas were turned down by AltaVista and Yahoo! And we haven’t even talked about Bob Dylan going electric yet. You see, people don’t actually love new ideas. The IBM engineer, Howard H. Aiken, said it perfectly: “Don’t worry about anyone stealing your ideas, because if it’s original you’ll have to ram it down their throats.”
Where’s the best place to put a path between two buildings?
The Idea Paradox
There's a good reason to not love new ideas. It keeps us alive. Any ancestors who compulsively jumped over every newly discovered cliff or ate any scary-looking plants died very quickly. Our collective desire for new ideas followed by our collective hesitancy to embrace them is called the Idea Paradox. The greater the potential of an idea, the harder it is to find anyone willing to try it. Rick Rubin explores this paradox in his book The Creative Act: A Way of Being through the lens of a new sound coming from your favorite artist: “When ideas are new, we don’t have a context for them; when we don’t have a context, new ideas can appear foreign or old.” So how do we solve for this Idea Paradox?
First, you need to be excellent at marketing. Making new ideas happen requires more skills of persuasion than brilliance. The fields of history are littered with innovations lost to civilization for generations more so because of failures of marketing and communications rather than technology. In Lost Discoveries, Dick Teresi educates us how the wheel, the steam engine, and freeze-dried foods all existed before 100 BE, but it took centuries for innovators to position them in ways the average person could use. (Perhaps our ancestors will be writing this about AI glasses). So what are some marketing techniques we can use to overcome the Idea Paradox?
Combine the Familiar with the New
Let’s learn from The Lion King. The classic technique to sell a new idea is to combine it with a familiar one. Provide the context that is missing. The Lion King was the first Disney production not based on a famous fairy tale and the team was having issues selling it through the ranks until they coined its new positioning: Hamlet in the Desert. Sold! They began from a place of novelty and then added familiarity for a point of reference and reassurance. They clashed two worlds in a way that made each part more digestible; the novel less scary and the familiar more interesting. Let’s enjoy some more: Alien was sold as “Jaws in Space.” The baby incubator was first sold as a “child hatchery” (what we do for chickens we can now do for babies). The first vacuum cleaner was called a “sweeping machine” and the first tape recorder a “sound mirror.”
In his fabulous book Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction, Derek Thompson builds on this technique by adding in one more essential ingredient. Lots and lots of exposure. So to have a hit, to sell in your brave new idea, remember these three rules:
1. Mix the familiar and the new.
2. Recycle old ideas.
3. Exposure is key.
TL:DR: Think outside the box. Sell your idea within the box.
Source:
Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act: A Way of Being
Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction
Lost Discoveries: The Ancient Roots of Modern Science—from the Babylonians to the Maya