If you are a writer or artist, you won’t be a stranger to
rejection. The more different what you’re doing is from what people are used
to, the more difficult you will find it to be accepted. Interestingly, this
seems to be just as much a problem in the field of science. The New York Times
features an article about inventor Jay Harmon and how slow companies have been
to adopt his breakthrough ideas.
I won’t go into detail about his breakthroughs here, but the article says, “Mr. Harman is a practitioner of biomimicry, a growing movement of the industrial-design field. Eleven years ago, he established Pax Scientific to commercialize his ideas, thinking that it would take only a couple of years to convince companies that they could increase efficiency, lower noise or create entirely new categories of products by following his approach.”
The article says he found that “companies that had little interest in redesigning their products, even in the face of the promise of double-digit increases in efficiency… Even in fields such as the computer industry, which celebrates innovation, systemic change can be glacial.”
His response is one we can learn from: “There is a basic psychology of the human species which is resistant to change,” he said, “but it’s not in my DNA to give up."
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