by Kevin Ashton
Rejection has value.
7 | THE REJECTION REFLEX
Judah Folkman was rejected for decades. His grants were denied, his papers returned, his audiences hostile. He endured lawsuits, demotion, innuendo, and insult. But he was a charming man. He inspired his researchers, was always available to patients, and told his wife he loved her every day. Folkman was not rejected because he was bad or because his ideas were bad. He was rejected because rejection is a natural consequence of new.
Why? Because we fear new as much as we need it.
In the 1950s, two psychologists, Jacob Getzels and Phillip Jackson, studied a group of high school students. All the students had higher-than-average IQs, but Getzels and Jackson found that the most creative students tended to have lower IQs than the least creative students. As part of the study, the students wrote brief autobiographies. One higher-IQ student wrote:
My autobiography is neither interesting or exciting and I see very little reason for writing it. However I shall attempt to write a certain amount of material which would be constructive. I was born May 8, 1943, in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. I am descended from a long line of ancestry which is mostly Scotch and English, with a few exceptions here and there. Most of my recent ancestors have lived in the southern US for a good while, though some are from New York. After being born, I remained in Georgia six weeks, after which I moved to Fairfax, Virginia. During my four-year stay there, I had few adventures of any kind.
One highly creative student wrote:
In 1943 I was born. I have been living without interruption ever since. My parents are my mother and father—an arrangement I have found increasingly convenient over the years. My father is a physician and surgeon—at least that’s what the sign on his office door says. Of course, he’s not anymore for Dad’s past the age where men ought to enjoy the rest of his life. He retired from Mercy Hospital Christmas before last. Got a fountain-pen for 27 years of service.
The difference between these two passages is typical of the differences the study found between the high-IQ children and the highly creative children. The highly creative children were funnier, more playful, less predictable, and less conventional than the high-IQ children. This was no surprise. The surprise was the teachers: they liked the high-IQ children, but they did not like the creative children. Getzels and Jackson were amazed. They had expected the opposite, because their experiment had revealed something else: the highly creative children were delivering academic results as good as or better than the high-IQ children—a performance far better than the twenty-three-point deficit in their IQ scores would predict. If you believed in IQ scores—and all the teachers in this school did—the highly creative children were beating the odds. But, even though the highly creative children were star performers who were exceeding expectations, the teachers did not like them. They preferred the less creative children who were performing as expected.
This was not a freak result. It has been repeated many times, and it remains the same today. The vast majority—98 percent—of teachers say creating is so important that it should be taught daily, but when tested, they nearly always favor less creative children over more creative children.
The Getzels-Jackson effect is not restricted to schools, and it persists into adulthood. Decision makers and authority figures in business, science, and government all say they value creation, but when tested, they do not value creators.
Why? Because people who are more creative also tend to be more playful, unconventional, and unpredictable, and all of this makes them harder to control. No matter how much we say we value creation, deep down, most of us value control more. And so we fear change and favor familiarity. Rejecting is a reflex.
We do not only reject other people’s creative instincts; often, we reject our own, too.
In one experiment, Dutch psychologist Eric Rietzschel asked people to score ideas based on how “feasible,” “original,” and “creative” they were, and then asked them which ones were “the best.” The ideas people selected as “the best” ideas were almost always the ones they had scored as the least “creative.”
When Rietzschel asked people to assess their own work, he got the same result: almost everybody thought their least “creative” ideas were their “best” ideas.
The findings are highly repeatable. Decades of data all show the same thing: even though we say we want creation, we tend to reject it.
8 | THE NATURE OF NO
The tendency to welcome new ideas in principle then reject them in practice is a feature, not a bug. Every species has its niche, and every niche has its risk and reward. The human race’s niche is the niche of new. Our reward is rapid adaptation: we can change our tools faster than evolution can change our bodies. Our risk is that the footsteps of new lead into darkness. Creating something new may kill us; creating nothing new certainly will. This makes us creatures of contradiction: we need and fear change. No one is only progressive or only conservative. Each of us is both. And so we say we want new, then choose same.
Our innate drive for new would make us extinct if it were unrestrained. Everyone would die trying everything. The instinct to reject is evolution’s solution to our problem of needing to make new while needing to take care.
We are wired to reject new things, or at least be suspicious of them. When we are in familiar situations, cells in our brain’s seahorse-shaped core, the hippocampus, fire hundreds of times faster than they do when we are in new situations. The hippocampus is connected to two tiny balls of neurons called amygdalae—from the Greek for “almonds”—that drive our emotions. The connection between the hippocampus and the amygdalae is one reason that same feels good and new may not.
As our brains react, so do we. We swerve from what feels bad to what feels better. When something is new, our hippocampus finds few matching memories. It signals unfamiliarity to our amygdalae, which give us feelings of uncertainty. Uncertainty is an aversive state: we avoid it if we can. Psychologists can show this in experiments. Feelings of uncertainty bias us against new things, make us prefer familiarity, and stop us from recognizing creative ideas. This happens even when we value creation or think we are good at creating.
To make matters worse, we fear rejection, too. As anyone who has lost a lover knows, rejection hurts. We use phrases like “brokenhearted,” “bruised egos,” and “hurt feelings,” because we feel physical pain when spurned—a word that, not coincidentally, comes from the Old English spurnen, “to kick.” In 1958, psychologist Harry Harlow proved something Aristotle had proposed twenty-five hundred years earlier: we need love like we need air. In experiments no ethics committee would allow today, Harlow separated newborn monkeys from their mothers. The babies preferred a soft, cloth surrogate mother doll to a wire surrogate, even though the wire version delivered food. Monkeys deprived of a soft surrogate often died, despite having enough food and water. Harlow called his paper “The Nature of Love” and concluded that physical contact is more important than calories. His finding extends to humans. We would rather die hungry than lonely.
Our primal need for connection doubles the dilemma of novelty. We are biased against new experiences, but it is hard to admit that we feel this way, even to ourselves, because we also face social pressure to make positive statements about creative ideas. We know we should not suggest that being creative is bad. We may even self-identify as “creative.” The bias against new is a prejudice a bit like sexism and racism: we know it is socially unacceptable to “dislike” creation, we sincerely believe we “like” creation, but when presented with a specific creative idea, we are more likely to reject it than we realize. And, when we present a creative idea to others, they are much more likely to reject it than they realize. It is human nature to say no to new.
Sexism and racism are famous prejudices. The bias against new is not. No one talks about newism. “Luddism,” our closest word, is a misunderstanding. The Luddites—about whom much more later—were English weavers who destroyed automatic looms to p
rotect their jobs during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although Luddism was, in the words of Thomas Pynchon, an effort to “deny the machine,” the attack on new technology was incidental. The Luddites were not fighting against new. They were fighting for their livelihoods. Yet their name fills the void in our vocabulary where there is a fear without a noun.
The bias against new is no less real because it goes unnamed; if anything, its anonymity makes it worse. Labels make things visible. Women and racial minorities are not surprised by prejudice against them. The words “sexism” and “racism” signal that sexism and racism exist. Newism comes with no such warning. When companies, academies, and societies revere creation in public and then reject it in private, creators are surprised and wonder what they did wrong.
Boston Children’s Hospital’s rejection of Judah Folkman is typical. Children’s is one of America’s highest-ranked hospitals and part of Harvard University, the oldest institute of higher learning in the United States. The hospital houses more than a thousand scientists and has produced Nobel laureates and Lasker Award winners. It is a place where new ideas should be welcomed. Yet Children’s punished Folkman for having a theory about cancer that his contemporaries found controversial. The hospital is proud of him now. But in 1981, when it stopped him from being a surgeon and reduced his pay, it was not. I chose Folkman’s story because it shows how flowers are sometimes mistaken for weeds. The point is not that Boston Children’s Hospital did something wrong. The point is that it did something normal.
What is not normal about Folkman’s story is his tenacity. It is hard to withstand repeated rejection. But we cannot create unless we know what to do with no.
9 | ESCAPING THE MAZE
How do we escape this maze of rejection, failure, and distraction?
Rejection is a reflex that evolved to protect us. No matter what we may gain, our first reactions to new are suspicion, skepticism, and fear. This is the right response: most ideas are bad. Stephen Jay Gould: “A man does not attain the status of Galileo merely because he is persecuted; he must also be right.”
Creators must expect rejection. The only way to avoid rejection is to avoid making anything new. Rejection is not a ticket to quit. It does not mean the work is bad. It does not mean we are bad. Rejection is about as personal as gravity.
At its best, rejection is information. It shows us what to do next. When Judah Folkman’s early critics argued that he was seeing inflammation, not blood vessels, he designed experiments to exclude inflammation. Rejection is not persecution. Drain it of its poison and what remains may be useful.
Franz Reichelt, the parachutist who leapt to his death, did not listen to the lessons of rejection or failure. He not only ignored experts who pointed out the flaws in his design, he ignored his own data. He tested his parachute using dummies, and they crashed. He tested his parachute by jumping thirty feet into a haystack, and he crashed. He tested his parachute by jumping twenty feet without a haystack, and he crashed and broke his leg. Instead of changing his invention again and again until it worked, he clung to his bad idea in the face of all evidence and stopped thinking at the first solution he’d found.
The creation is not the creator. Great creators do not extend their belief in themselves to their work. A creation can be changed. The problem-solution loop never ends. Reichelt’s loop ended soon after it began. His tragedy is a metaphor for the problem with leaps. He saw a problem and tried to solve it not with a series of steps but with a leap both literal and figurative. He was not an artist of new but a martyr to same.
Ignaz Semmelweis, the hand-washing obstetrician so vexed by rejection that he lost his job, then his life, missed a huge opportunity. Semmelweis had found something of world-changing importance: a link between cadavers and disease. His critics complained that he did not know what it was. He believed that saving lives was convincing enough. But it was not. If he had taken his rejection less personally and fought back by devoting himself to understanding more, he, not Louis Pasteur, might have discovered germs, and his contribution might have saved lives everywhere forever, instead of in one place for a few years.
Failure is a kind of rejection best done in private. The greatest creators are their own greatest critics. They look at their work even more deeply than other people will, and they test it against more exacting standards. They reject most of what they make either in part (as Stephen King does when he throws away two-thirds of his words) or in whole (as James Dyson does when he condemns yet another prototype) many times before anybody else gets to. The world is already inclined to reject you. Do not give it more reasons than necessary. Never have a failure in public that you could have in private. Private failures are faster, cheaper, and less painful.
Our nature does not help us. In addition to the discomfort with ambiguity that pushes us to want to find solutions quickly, there is also the problem of pride. Pride and its opposite, shame, can make us fearful of failure and resentful of rejection. Our ego does not want to hear no. We want to be right the first time, make a quick buck, be an overnight success. The creativity myth, with its roots in genius, aha! moments, and other magic, appeals to the part of us that wants to win without work, get without sweat, make no mistakes. None of these things are possible. Do not take pride in your work. Earn it.
We can learn a lot from what people do when they get lost in real mazes—along backcountry hiking routes, on terrain crossed with old trails, and in other places where losing your way can be deadly. This is only somewhat metaphorical. Whether we are creating or walking, we are trying to get somewhere by taking steps and making choices.
William Syrotuck analyzed 229 cases of people who became lost, 25 of whom died. He found that when we are lost, most of us act the same way. First, we deny that we are going in the wrong direction. Then, as the realization that we are in trouble seeps in, we press on, hoping chance will lead us. We are least likely to do the thing that is most likely to save us: turn around. We know our path is wrong, yet we rush along it, compelled to save face, to resolve the ambiguity, to achieve the goal. Pride propels us. Shame stops us from saving ourselves.
Great creators know that the best step forward is often a step back—to scrutinize, analyze, and assess, to find faults and flaws, to challenge and to change. You cannot escape a maze if you only move forward. Sometimes the path ahead is behind.
Rejection educates. Failure teaches. Both hurt. Only distraction comforts. And of these, only distraction can lead to destruction. Rejection and failure can nourish us, but wasted time is a tiny death. What determines whether we will succeed as creators is not how intelligent we are, how talented we are, or how hard we work, but how we respond to the adversity of creation.
Why is changing the world so hard? Because the world does not want to change.
1 | ROBIN
June 1979 was a cold, wet month in Western Australia. The worst day was Monday, June 11. An inch of rain fell, blown by a mean wind that turned windows into drums. Behind a loud window in Perth, a man with a silver beard and bolo tie looked through his microscope and saw something that would change the world.
Robin Warren was a pathologist at the Royal Perth Hospital. What he saw were bacteria in a patient’s stomach. Scientists had known that bacteria could not grow in the stomach since the beginning of bacteriology. Stomachs are acidic, so they had to be sterile. The bacteria Warren saw were curved like croissants. They flattened the brushy surface of the stomach’s lining. Warren could see them at magnifications of one hundred, but his colleagues could not. He showed them images magnified one thousand times, then some taken with a high-power electron microscope. They eventually saw the bacteria but not the point. Only Warren thought the discovery meant something, although he did not know what.
He did not rush to judgment, like Ignaz Semmelweis, nor did he disregard possible objections, like Franz Reichelt, nor did he allow his rejection instinct to delete the gleam of something new. Warren was a quieter, shier man than Judah Folkma
n, but his response to being the only person in the lab who thought he had seen something significant was Folkmanesque. He believed what he saw, he believed it might be important, and he would not be dissuaded. In his report of that day’s biopsy, he wrote: “It contains numerous bacteria. They appear to be actively growing and not a contaminant. I am not sure of the significance of these unusual findings, but further investigation may be worthwhile.”
Having seen the bacteria once, he saw them often. They were in one out of every three stomachs. The dogma of the sterile stomach said bacteria could not live in the gut. No one else had ever seen bacteria there. “The apparent absence of any previous report was given to me as one of the main reasons why they could not be there at all,” he said.
Warren collected samples of the bacteria that were not there for two years, until he found someone who believed him.
Barry Marshall was a newly hired gastroenterologist who needed a research project. Warren, like all pathologists, did not see patients. He worked with samples clinicians gave him, most of which were from ulcers and lesions. This made seeing the bacteria harder: activity around the wounds added noise. Marshall agreed to send Warren biopsies from ulcer-free sites, and the two men started to collaborate.