The Myths of Innovation

Chapter 4. People love new ideas

Imagine it’s 1874, and you’ve just invented the telephone. After high-fiving your friend Watson, you head down to Western Union—the greatest communication company in the world—and show your work. Despite your excellent pitch (a century before PowerPoint), Western Union turns you down on the spot, calls the telephone a useless toy, and shows you to the door. Would you have given up? What if the next five companies turned you down? The next 25? How long would it take you to lose faith in your ideas?

Fortunately, Alexander Graham Bell, the telephone’s inventor, didn’t listen to the folks at Western Union.^[74] He started his own business and changed the world, paving the way for the mobile phone in your pocket. Similar stories surround innovators like Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, whose page rank ideas were turned down by AltaVista and Yahoo!, the dominant search companies of the day. George Lucas was told all kinds of no by every major Hollywood studio but one, for the original Star Wars screenplay. And, don’t forget that Einstein’s E=mc², Galileo’s sun-centered solar system, and Darwin’s theory of evolution were laughed at for years by experts around the world.

Every great idea in history has the big, red stamp of rejection on its face. It’s hard to see today because once ideas gain acceptance, we gloss over the hard paths they took to get ...