Individuals with Truly Innovative Ideas Should Expect to Be Treated Like They’re Crazy

How I define innovation, and how I don’t

Two weeks ago I started shaving every day because I noticed it makes me look less dirty. This is the first time I’ve been shaving daily since I was like 20 and once again I had to relearn the painful lesson that the best way to know if it’s time to throw your razor away is if it slices your neck to pieces. As I watched the red beads of blood slip past my Adam’s apple towards my chest and pink water drip from the razor into the sink I sardonically thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if those clever entrepreneur chaps down at the Old Street Roundabout came up with an app that reminded me when to change my disposable razor without me having to use my own face as a performance metric?”

Of course, you might say, I could just count how many days it takes me from starting a new razor to losing a pint of blood, and simply try to remember: “three days” or “four days” or “five days.” Or, you might suggest, if I have a bad memory I could draw giant X’s on the wall of the bathroom in permanent black marker to count off how many days till I next change my razor. But I don’t want to do either of those things. I want an app that does it for me, something I download to my phone with minimalist sexy illustrations of clean-shaven well-groomed men who shout at me in a deep, rich baritone, “Brian, I think it’s time you change your razor,” every time I’m about to cut up my face with a stale, old piece of plastic and metal. I’ll leave the logistics and the algorithms to the developers, that’s what they love to do anyway. The point is, I’m tired of going out on dates and having a red scratchy neck, and I don’t want to go back to the bearded man look, which as far as I’m concerned is just a way for men with funny faces to hide that fact from the world (if you’re handsome, go ahead and grow a beard, and in my eyes you’ll be no more or less handsome).

Of course I’m joking about this. Because as far as I’m concerned me getting a bloody neck every five to six days (because it’s always been five to six days ever since I was 20 years old) is just God and Gillette’s punishment to me for being stupid. For me being too lazy to run back to my bedroom to grab a clean razor when I’m already standing naked in the bathroom halfway through my full-body “manly grooming.” For me being too dumb to know to keep the halfway used razors somewhere different from the ones I suspect might be old and ready to cut me, and then mixing up the two. And for me being so idiotic as to hold on to all the old-and-ready-to-cut-me razors as backup for some future day when I might run out of new, fresh razors instead of just walking across the street to the supermarket and buying new fresh razors. I do not need an app to remind me not to do these things, because even if I get the app I’m still going to be dumb and do them anyway.

I worked for a while in something called a “co-working office” which was full of entrepreneurs and startups, people turning their dreams into business ideas into into products into money. I would say about 95% of the “game-changing ideas” I saw and heard around there were things like apps that tell you when to change your disposable razor. And I used to think that was fine. As Liza Minnelli and Joel Grey would be the first to tell you, “money makes the world go round” and even the buying and selling of stupid stuff keeps the wheels of the economy turning and average Joe’s in a job. Plus who knows, there’s occasionally that greedy person who’s just trying to come up with something that’ll make human-waste-loads full of money who accidentally invents something good that changes the world instead.

This Monday I went to a panel discussion at Chatham House in London on innovation and growth, and most of the speakers sounded to me like they were taking a Google AdWords list of keywords on innovation and recombining them in all kinds of jazzy ways, plus throwing in some other complicated fancy-schmancy words to confuse the audience (because most people assume somebody who confuses them must be smarter than them). But there was one speaker who got my attention. She said real innovation doesn’t come from a gaggle of clever kids renting desk space in Shoreditch; it comes from big government investment, whether it’s Google’s famous algorithm or new pharmaceuticals. I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but my ears always pop up when I hear someone saying something different, just like I whenever I see a group of people talking about how something’s cool I assume they’re just keeping up with the trends and trying to fit in with the cool crowd.

When I was in the co-working office with its 400-odd members there were like two people, max, who seemed to have an idea that was really different. And both of them were regarded by the rest of the people in the office as “crazy” and “old” (naturally, truly great ideas come most often out of fresh-faced youth who’ve never tasted the pain of life rather than our elders who know something already about what life is made of). It seems common sense to me that if an individual has a truly disruptive idea, everyone around him is going to find him a threat to their way of thinking and being and whisper behind his back that he’s crazy, and tell him to his face that “I’d love to talk to ya but I’m just so busy,” and do whatever they can to try to run him out of town. And any idea that wins support and that people crowd around, well it probably appeals to the same old consumerist money-hungry distract-me-I’m-bored way of thinking and living that most people have, except maybe now instead of being a mobile phone or a luxury handbag it’s an app or an algorithm, the same old human waste painted in new fancy colors because new and young is always better than old and tried and true.

That speaker who was talking about big government investment in innovation—well, if you’re a lone mad scientist working inside some big corporation or government agency on a giant government grant, you can chase your crazy idea for five years or ten years and not worry about someone running you out of town. Not only that, you can probably research something like interstellar travel that will take the human race to new levels of consciousness instead of developing apps that tell people when to change their razor blades, when to change their jobs and when to leave their spouses.

If you’re just average folk with a lunatic idea and you rent yourself some desk space in East London hoping to bump into angel investors in a coffee shop who say, “That’s an interesting doodle of a starship you’ve just done on your napkin, would you like ten gazillion pounds for it, and we’ll even throw in some new clothes and a haircut for you so we’re not embarrassed to have you at meetings with us,” well then good luck to you. But you know what else, if you’re just average folk with some crazy, brilliant dream of an idea for trying to change the world, why are you trying to start a business anyway? Because you want to get rich? Because you want to be a success? Because you want to feel like people like you? If you really believe in your idea, that there’s something of the immortal at the heart of it, then you owe it to your idea to suffer all the pain and hunger and hardship that the mortal world will deal out to you while you give birth to it. That’s what I call being innovative.