“Mad Men” has this great scene, where Don Draper and the team present a really new idea to Heinz ketchup for an advertisement, at least in the context of the story. The client does exactly what you describe, just reject the idea after thinking about it.
I just read that ‘Heinz’ ad company is actually doing the ads from Mad Men. I thought that was kind of amazing, because, it’s been a few years since that episode aired (2013). There was a show on AMC at the time, The Pitch, which was all about ‘the real life world of’ advertising pitches.
Something about that, seeing an episode where a company rejects a great ad, while simultaneously being product placement (ie, Heinz gets a free ad in the middle of Mad Men), while another show airs where clients get two pitches (ie, more free advertisement) … and even with that kind of environment, it takes Heinz 4 years to say, “Hey, that Mad Men ketchup ad was pretty good, let’s run it.” Around the time that a lot of people are going, “Oh, yeah, Mad Men!” But for me, it just reminded me of a simple truth about human nature.
People generally abhor creativity; the more novel an idea is, the more likely that people will reject it. This is partly a cultural trait, but arguably, it may be a ‘feature’ of the human brain. Novelty is a situation that requires more energy to deal with than something relatable. Like, if you’ve never seen a tiger before, but encountered one for the first time, surviving it would require more energy than if, say, you had encountered one before and knew what to do in the situation.
If you create something novel or have an interesting idea, you understand it; by the time you share it, it’s probably not novel to you.
But it will be novel to people who encounter it, and because of that, their instincts will be to reject the novel idea. If the idea is rooted in something familiar, that potentially reduces the chance of the idea getting rejected.
Now, it’s also possible you just have a bad idea. That happens. Having bad ideas and putting them into the world isn’t the same as having harmful ideas and putting them out there. The former is someone showing some courage (another thing in short supply in some cultures), the latter is someone trying to find a way to harm people (ie, the resurrection of white nationalist ideology as a political force). If you look at someone like Milo Yiannopoulos, on the surface, he seems very novel, presenting transgressive ideas. But if you think about it, he’s presenting very old ideas, without any original thought added to them. Some people reject the ideas outright, because they hurt people. Other people are willing to give them a listen, or worse embrace them, perhaps due to that familiarity.
Getting yourself to move beyond rejecting a novel idea instinctually is hard. Sharing novel ideas that can get rejected is hard. If a culture moves in a more conservative direction, one way people can express fear is via regression; literally looking for past ideas and concepts to grab onto.
If you’re willing to put out new ideas, fail, and learn from the failures, you’re arguably doing something that’s intrinsic and uniquely human. But it’s just as human to reject ideas, and cloister away from anything new. It takes people time, and frankly, most of are pretty average in our thinking.
Most of us are going to be the people who would have seen a Van Gogh painting, and thought, “What is this horrible blobby mess? This isn’t proper art.”
It’s why every creative person knows that the best way to describe a new work is to say, “It’s like A meets B, but with a C.” A is a familiar thing, B is a familiar but diametrically different thing, and C ends up being something to help emphasize the contrast.
“My show, Breaking Bad, is like Mister Chips meets Scarface, but told through the lens of the drug war at the Southern border.”
“My movie, Guardians of the Galaxy, is like Star Wars meets Ocean’s 11, but with a strong focus on the friendship of the crew with a backdrop of alien worlds.”
Martin Luther King, Jr., is another person who falls into the tableau. We embrace him now just as we embrace Van Gogh. But when he said his ideas, in his life? Most people rejected him. In 1966, one year before he was murdered, 66% of Americans viewed him unfavorably. Today, he’s used as a saintly image, with familiar quotes, by the same ordinary kinds of people who would have hated him in his life.
If you have strange ideas, not the kind that hurt people but the kind that seem out of nowhere, it takes courage to share them. And even more to keep pushing forward in the face of rejection.
Even teachers can do this. I try to watch for this bias in myself like a hawk, and really try to look closely if the groundbreaking thing is why I’m saying no.