Unreasonable and Beneficial

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, motivation, creativity, nonconformists

Do you know the old song "High Hopes"? Part of it says,

Just what makes that little old ant

Think he'll move that rubber tree plant.

Anyone knows an ant, can't

Move a rubber tree plant!

But he's got high hopes, he's got high hopes;

He's got high apple pie, in the sky hopes.

So any time you're gettin' low,

'stead of lettin' go

Just remember that ant:

Oops! There goes another rubber tree –

Oops! There goes another rubber tree –

Oops! There goes another rubber tree plant!

Then there was Harlan D. Sanders…you know, Colonel Sanders. I am not sure how he lived to age 65; by then he had failed in business a number of times, and in the legends that swirl around his name the range is from seven to more than 1,000. One might think he'd get discouraged, but he was too scrappy to keep an ordinary job; he had to be self-employed. When the timing was right, his fried chicken business finally made him wealthy. Apparently his "business failures" had kept body and soul together until then.

In Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, by Adam Grant, we read of a number of people who didn't settle for the status quo. They didn't conform. That's all it takes to be a non-conformist. The thing is, there are a lot more non-conformists than there are successful non-conformists. But, really, there are a lot more musicians than there are successful musicians. Are you a non-conformist, but feeling dragged down? The book may have some useful ideas for you.

The book's focus is people who caused good things to happen, who were Originals. George Bernard Shaw put it this way:

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

Thus, each chapter presents and a principle or maxim that an Original must deal with, and shows how someone did so. We learn quite early that it is risky to go against the grain (or against the tide). The first chapter, "Creative Destruction" (headed by the Shaw quote above) tackles that notion. The author highlights the origin of the online eyeglasses industry by four young men who started Warby Parker, in the face of enormous, "Nobody will want that!" -style criticism. I've used Warby Parker. I heard of them long before I tried them out. They're actually losing the marketing edge to some even less reasonable competitors, but they're the big dog in that arena. Adam Grant had passed up the chance to invest in WP in 2009, "…the worst financial decision I've ever made…", he tells us.

As much as we might idealize those who "speak truth to power," we recognize that most of those who do so get effectively squashed. In Chapter 3, "Out on a Limb", we find that we need to build credibility and status to be heard by the powers that be, assuming that is relevant. In the CIA of thirty years ago, Carmen Medina saw the need for faster communications in all directions within "the Company". She thought electronic communications—which weren't all that new—could help. After persistently speaking up she was "sent to Siberia" within the agency, and lucky she wasn't fired outright. By building credibility and status from her "Siberian" post, several years later she was able to co-create Intellipedia. Now it is indispensable. 

That reminds me of Martin Luther. He was a nobody, a monk in Wittenberg, a rather nowhere place 80 km southwest of Berlin. The changing political climate (and newly invented printing press) set the stage for his "95 Theses" to "go viral". A generation earlier, he'd have soon wound up in prison or the grave. And he soon gained political protection from anti-clerical German princes, or he'd be forgotten today and any Protestant Reformation would have started decades later, if at all.

To quote Shaw again, a quote R.F. Kennedy used:

"You see things; and you say 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?' "

I count it a character flaw of mine that it seems I always fail at "speaking truth to power", and quail in the face of opposing authority. Yet somehow I build a career on doing things I'd been told not to do by supervisors whom I was able to hoodwink long enough that they saw I was making clients happier, and "overlooked" my insubordination. But it took dying (and being resuscitated) on the operating table to give me the gumption to take a stand and stick to it when I thought it was warranted, which capped my career with significant success.

Few of us are in such a position that being a non-conformist will really get us anywhere. But look around. Nearly everything that makes this old world livable started with an idea, but even more, with a person who went against the tide to make the idea a reality. As Henry Ford said, "In 1890 people just wanted a better horse." Ford was not the first to produce a working and practical automobile (that was probably Carl Benz). He was one of a host of dreamers (including Olds, Nash, the Studebaker brothers, Cadillac, and DeLorean) who shaped the industry. The most powerful force is an idea.

I could say that I suggest this as a book to be read by any entrepreneur, (or wannabe). Maybe. Or maybe it's best to let folks with a gleam in their eye dive in and duke it out in the public arena. A key characteristic of Originals is that they are, well, Original! I think they ought to read it anyway.

There is a quirk in the eBook I read. At the bottom of nearly half the screens (virtual pages) I find the first syllable or two of a word, often in the middle of a line that ends prematurely. There is no hyphen. The next screen begins with the rest of the word. I don't find this in any of the other eBooks I have read, so far.