7.
Screw Up Your
Courage

Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger.

Franklin P. Jones

I’m not afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

Woody Allen

No call alligator “long mouth” till you pass him.

Jamaican proverb

As I said, courage and curiosity are the two character traits all creative people seem to have.

But why do some people have these traits and others don’t? And what can you do about it if you don’t?

In the previous chapter we talked about curiosity and how to do deliberately what people who are curious do naturally.

But how can we become more courageous?

“An idea is delicate,” said Charles Brower, the head of an advertising agency. “It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a quip and worried to death by a frown on the right man’s brow.”

I think this is why many people seem bereft of ideas.

They’ve run into too many sneers and yawns, they’ve heard too many quips. And so they’ve said the heck with it and don’t even try to come up with ideas any more.

The fear of rejection shuts down their idea factories.

I can’t tell you how to get enough courage to push ahead, to ignore the doubts and raised eyebrows and pooh-poohing you get when you tell people what you’ve got in mind.

All I know is that you must.

It will help to remember five things:

1. Everybody’s Afraid—Everybody

The more naturally creative you are the more fear you probably feel, for your antennae are more finely attuned and you’re more aware of what other people are thinking, more sensitive to their feelings, more affected by their actions. So it’s only natural that you should get uptight and feel antsy and be afraid.

In the face of such fear it takes courage to speak out.

For courage—as Søren Kierkegaard and Ernest Hemingway and Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus and others point out—is not the absence of fear. It is going ahead in spite of the danger, in spite of being afraid or feeling despair.

“Creativity is dangerous,” wrote Robert Grudin in The Grace of Great Things.

“We cannot open ourselves to new insights without endangering the security of our prior assumptions. We cannot propose new ideas without risking disapproval and rejection.”

Just remember, though, that the people who sneer or quip are afraid too. Afraid of your ideas.

That is often why they sneer or quip.

After all, ideas by their very nature are potentially destructive. They can change things. And the more original the ideas, the more radical the changes. And the more changes ideas wreak, the more they threaten people; the more they make people question their beliefs and actions, the more they make people anxious about their jobs and their futures.

So next time fight through your fear and blurt out your idea. If for no other reason than to make the other guy afraid.

2. There Are No Bad Ideas

Madame Curie had a “bad” idea that turned out to be radium.

Richard Drew had a “bad” idea that turned out to be Scotch tape.

Joseph Priestley invented carbonated water while he was investigating the chemistry of the air.

Blaise Pascal invented roulette while he was experimenting with perpetual motion.

Alexander Graham Bell was trying to invent a hearing aid when he invented the telephone.

Vulcanized rubber was discovered by accident by Charles Goodyear. So was antiknock gasoline by Charles Kettering. So was electric current by Luigi Galvani. So were potato chips by George Crum at the Moon Lake Lodge resort in Saratoga Springs. So was immunology by Louis Pasteur. So were X-rays by Wilhelm Roentgen. So was the telescope by Hans Lippershey. So was practical photography by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre. So was radioactivity by Henri Becquerel. So were friction matches by John Walker. So was the Slinky toy by Richard James. So was the microwave oven by Percy LeBaron Spencer. So was the pacemaker by Wilson Greatbatch. So was Teflon by Roy Plunkett. So was Krazy Glue by Harry Coover. So was Scotchgard by Patsy Sherman. So was penicillin by Alexander Fleming.

So was America by Christopher Columbus.

The moral? Never cry over spilled milk. Find a use for it. Or invent a better milk carton.

3. You Can Always Get Another idea—
Probably Even a Better One

In advertising, your ideas are always being turned down. It’s the nature of the business.

And when they are turned down you grouse about it. You bitch and complain and swear and make idle threats and have too much to drink at lunch and go home early and yell at your kids.

Ralph Price had a different reaction, one that I’ve tried to acquire over the years.

“Rats,” I’d say while leaving the client’s building. “That was a great campaign they just turned down.”

“Wow, this is super!” Ralph would say. “Now we can do a really great campaign.”

You see, Ralph not only knew there was always another idea, he knew there was always a better idea.

If there wasn’t, what were we doing in the advertising business? It was our job to come up with ideas. And if we couldn’t beat our last idea—if our last idea was the best we could ever come up with—then we might as well quit, for we were on our way down, and pretty soon our bosses would get somebody who could come up with a better idea.

So Ralph never looked at a rejection as a defeat. It was an opportunity to do something better.

But even if you can’t emulate Ralph when your idea somehow doesn’t work, remember that at least you’ve found out what doesn’t work, and that should help you get an idea that does.

It certainly helped Thomas Edison. In attempting to make a light bulb, he tried over a thousand ideas before he hit the one that worked.

Ray Bradbury wrote at least one short story every week for ten years before he wrote one that made the hair on his neck stand up.

Orville and Wilbur Wright worked for years trying to build an airplane. For the wings alone, they tested more than 200 designs in a wind tunnel they built.

Johannes Kepler spent nine years and filled 9,000 folio sheets with calculations in his small handwriting trying to work out the orbit of Mars before he concluded that the paths of the planets were not circular but elliptical.

So don’t think that your idea is the end of the line. It’s the beginning of another line.

4. Nobody Is Ever Crítícízed for Gettíng Too

Perhaps one of the things that is inhibiting you is the fear that your reputation, your future even, is riding on the idea you are about to suggest.

Perhaps it is, perhaps the sky will fall, perhaps people will laugh at you, or perhaps your idea won’t work and will ruin the company you work for and you’ll get fired and your family will disown you and your dog will run away and you’ll die a pauper and a failure.

OK then, don’t place all your dreams on one idea. Come up with a lot of ideas. That way you’ll be known as “that genius with all the ideas” instead of “that jerk with the lousy idea.”

5. Getting an Idea Is Worth It

It’s a great feeling—swinging for the fences and connecting.

There’s nothing quite like it. You’re sitting in a room trying to come up with an idea, a solution, a way to go, and nothing is happening, and there is nothing there but walls and barriers and closed doors and stop signs and dead ends, and you’re frustrated and worried and wondering if you’ll ever find a way out of this maze, this box, this trap, when all of a sudden it hits, and wham—you see the whole thing, all at once, solved, with everything fitting and working together. Wheee.

“Creative achievement is the boldest initiative of the mind,” said Robert Grudin, “an adventure that takes its hero simultaneously to the rim of knowledge and the limits of propriety.

“Its pleasure is not the comfort of the safe harbor, but the thrill of the reaching sail.”

Swing for the fences. Go for broke.

Compared to a reaching sail, a safe harbor is pap.