Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World

Cohesion doesn’t cause groupthink anywhere else, either.

world

According to Galenson, conceptual innovators are sprinters, and experimental innovators are marathoners.

Many people fail to achieve originality because they generate a few ideas and then obsess about refining them to perfection.

Since the market is more defined when settlers enter, they can focus on providing superior quality instead of deliberating about what to offer in the first place.

undercommunicate our ideas. They’re already so familiar to us that we underestimate how much exposure an audience needs to comprehend and buy into them. When Harvard professor John Kotter studied change agents years ago, he found that they typically undercommunicated their visions by a factor of ten.

Third, along with being less recklessly ambitious, settlers can improve upon competitors’ technology to make products better. When you’re the first to market, you have to make all the mistakes yourself. Meanwhile, settlers can watch and learn from your errors.

If we want to understand how to manage fear, we don’t have to threaten people’s lives; we need only threaten to put them on stage.

At some point, we’ve all considered voicing a minority opinion, protesting a policy that doesn’t make sense, championing a novel way of doing things, or standing up for a disadvantaged group of people. This chapter is about when to speak up and how to do it effectively without jeopardizing our careers and relationships. What are the right times to