To predict the future 1/3 of you need to be crazy

So far this is a bit of a horrifying conundrum where I am a technical startup failure, but in good spirits or a corporate success and in bad mood all the time.

I've found when I'm at a startup there is enormous willingness to believe that my crazy ideas might create an opportunity -- likely because C-suite has nothing to lose and everything to gain. While I'm in a corp environment at the top of the market, VP's have everything to lose and very little they can imagine that can get better (other than competitive catchup scenarios).

This leads to a really deadly cycle, where large companies shun real innovation because of the perceived risk being 100,000,000x higher than at a startup since one has 0 to lose, and the other has billions.

The net-net result here is that big corps never end up being first movers, since they need to see opportunity illustrated by a competitor before they move on it. This sets up the corp team for failure though, as they are assigned to catch up to a competitor already established and building a product on a good foundation and likely years ahead in thinking.

An excerpt:

    ...dissent stimulates new ideas because it encourages
    us to engage more fully with the work of others and to
    reassess our viewpoints. “There’s this Pollyannaish
    notion that the most important thing to do when working
    together is stay positive and get along, to not hurt
    anyone’s feelings,” she says. “Well, that’s just wrong.
    Maybe debate is going to be less pleasant, but it will
    always be more productive. True creativity requires
    some trade-offs.”

1. Thinking on your own can lead to more solutions than thinking in a group.

2. Dissent and constraints stimulate creativity.

3. Insane, off-the-wall, unproductive ideas can stimulate creativity in everyone else.

[0] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/01/30/groupthink

My parents believed I was nuts: "With no real world experience you should not create a company", they said, "first work for someone else, get experience, and then make a company if you want".

My girlfriend thought I was also nuts, she blackmailed me: My (stupid) idea or she. I chose my stupid idea. She wanted to get back a week later but it was too late.

My friends could not understand either why take "pies on the sky" when I had good options on a "real work".

After creating my company everything took way longer than expected, I started believing it was not a good idea after all, you only have the energy you have after it is depleted.

But one day I read a document I wrote when I started my company and was incredibly shocked that everything I wrote down in the past was becoming real in the present!!

Things started to roll, I got more confident...in the end it was a huge success precisely because it was such a crazy idea.

Had I followed my parents' advice, I would never have never done what I did, "experience in the past" would have blocked the possibilities of the future and the beginners mind.

This all really plays into argumentative theory [0], which is the basic idea that human reason developed as an argumentative tool. Its main function isn't "true" or "logical" ideas, but rather persuasion and defense thereof. One major conclusion is that reason often works to reinforce existent ideals against external challenge, regardless of the merit of those ideas.

[0] http://evolution.binghamton.edu/evos/wp-content/uploads/2011...

    What important truth do very few people agree with you on?

If one can take this literally (and it wouldn't surprise me at all, but who knows for sure), it shows how even the cream of the crop smart people are subject to either group-think or fear of rocking the boat they are sitting in - now imagine if your workplace of relatively average people are subject to or engage in similar behavior.

The tenacity of the engineer to stand up to that culture is extremely admirable.

We landed on the moon on July 20th 1969."

'Chapeau' (hats off).

Been paying attention to space and SF for way too many moons, had never read this story.

It's not that you have to be crazy, it's that most people around you are actually the crazy ones who push conformance on you because they can't hack it.

Innovating is difficult due to many people being so very risk averse. Ideally you have a balance between caution and boldness, however, people lose the will to take chances when the "bottom" line is at risk.

Of course, when it comes to what NASA does, the bottom line also involves human lives. Although, then NASA's existence would have and probably is still considered crazy by some number of people.

(Conversely, it would be interesting to see what ideas the world's best medical researchers and biologists come up with for particle physics and software development.)