A-lister Hugh Macleod - who became such a rock star since his Lift06 talk that he doesn’t answer my emails anymore :D - is preparing another brilliant piece of thinking in his next book “Ignore everybody“. Hugh talks about something many entrepreneurs have experienced, the sorry/uncomprehending/dis-motivating/negative feedback you get when you present your breakthrough idea to someone who doesn’t understand it:

1. “Good ideas have lonely childhoods”. When I say, “Ignore Everybody”, I don’t mean, “Ignore all people, at all times, forever”. No, other people’s feedback plays a very important role. Of course it does. It’s more like, the better the idea, the more “out there” it initially will seem to other people, even people you like and respect. So there’ll be a time in the beginning when you have to press on, alone, without one tenth the support you probably need. This is normal. This is to be expected. Ten years later, drawing my “cartoons on the back of business cards” seems a no-brainer, in terms of what it has brought me, both emotionally and to my career. But I can also clearly remember when I first started drawing them, the default reaction was “people scratching their heads”. Sure, a few people thought they were kinda interesting and whatnot, but even with my closest friends, they seemed a complete, non-commercial exercise in futility for the New York world I was currently living in. Happily, time proved otherwise.

2. “GOOD IDEAS ALTER THE POWER BALANCE IN RELATIONSHIPS, THAT IS WHY GOOD IDEAS ARE ALWAYS INITIALLY RESISTED.” The older I get, the truer this sentence seems to be. Especially in industries that are more relationship-driven, than idea-driven.

Link

Rock on!

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 5th, 2008 at 8:11 pm and is filed under entrepreneurship, food for thought. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.