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Why You Should Learn To Love Your Haters
Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas,” said the computing pioneer Howard Aiken. “If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.” The truth is that any idea important enough to be valuable will be disruptive enough to inspire significant opposition to it ever gaining traction.
This phenomenon is often known as the Semmelweis Effect, after the Hungarian physician who pioneered hand washing in hospitals. Unfortunately, the medical establishment rejected his ideas and antiseptic procedures didn’t come into common use decades later. Millions of people died needlessly.
Yet as I’ve previously explained, much of the blame lays at Semmelweis’s door. Instead of taking into account valid criticisms of how he collected and communicated his data, he railed against the establishment, became a pariah and lost all credibility. The truth is that we need our critics, if for no other reason than that they have the power to save us from ourselves.
Exposing Flaws In Your Idea
One of the most effective programs for helping to bring discoveries out of the lab is I-Corps. First established by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to help recipients of SBIR grants identify business models for scientific discoveries, it has been such an extraordinary success that the US…
