Ideas and fear

Here is an idea.

Why do you cringe? Why does the audience hesitate? What provokes resistance?

Often our ideas are simply lacking in relevance. They're not tuned appropriately for the context of the buyer or the audience. Or our ideas might reek of misinformation or lack of information.

If we're sensitive, we'll soon figure out what we've been missing and optimize quickly. That's the gamble and responsibility of being an ideas person -- you give it your best shot based on what you were capable of knowing. You fail fast, and try again.

The other cause of failure has nothing to do with the idea and everything to do with fear.

As Anthony De Mello reminds us: “...it's not easy to listen; you're always listening from your programming, from your conditioning...”

If an idea you've developed rubs uncomfortably against an audience's constraints (and we/they all have them!), you'll be selling against fear -- but of what?

Fear is so often a first reaction, for obvious biological reasons. Fear has kept our physical beings alive. And in that sense, what we fear is the unknown.

Yet in the realm of ideas, we can not fear the unknown. De Mello clarifies: “What you really fear is the loss of the known.”

Yes, if we are to enact a new idea, then something else -- an existing, embraced idea -- must die, must fail, most lose out to what is now proposed.

We're not just selling in favor of the appeal of the new, but also selling against the loss of the known.

This is the politics of ideas.

So it can be very much worth the while to consider how an idea competes with the known, and how you will manage not just the excitement of birth but the death of the familiar.