Marc Andreessen says successful innovators endure social pain and repeated failure until they learn to tolerate it. He points to historical clusters like Renaissance Florence and Silicon Valley where like-minded people push each other forward, though clusters can also breed groupthink and fads.
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This is probably the thing that gets missed the most because the process of innovating, the process of creating something new. Once it works, the stories get retconned, as they say in comic books. The stories get adapted to where it's like it was inevitable all along. Everybody always knew that this was a good idea. The person has won all these awards, society embraced them. And invariably, if you were with them when they were actually doing the work, or if you actually get a couple drinks into them and talk to them about it, it'd be like, no, that's not how it happened at all. They faced a wall of skepticism, just like a wall of basically social, essentially denial. No, this is not going to work. No, I'm not going to Jo. No, I'm not going to come work for your company. No, I'm not going to buy your product. No, I'm not going to meet with you. And so they get just like tremendous social resistance. They're not getting positive feedback from their social network the way that more agreeable people need to have. This is why agreeableness is a problem for innovation. If you're agreeable, you're going to listen to the people around you. They're going to tell you that new ideas are stupid, end of story. You're not going to proceed. And so I would put it more on. They need to be able to deal with social discomfort to the level of ostracism, or at some point they're going to get shaken out and they're just going to quit.
Do you think that people that meet these criteria do best by banding with others that meet these criteria early? Or is it important that they form this deep sense of self, like the ability to cry oneself to sleep at night or lie in the fetal position worrying that things aren't going to work out and then still get up the next morning and get right back out there?
Right. So Sean Parker has the best line, by the way, on this. He says being an entrepreneur, being a creator, is like getting punched in the face over and over again. He said, eventually you start to like the taste of your own blood. And I love that line because it makes everybody, like, massively uncomfortable, but it gives you a sense of how basically painful the process is. If you talk to any entrepreneur who's been through it about that, they're like, oh, yeah, that's exactly what it's like. So there is this. There is a big individual component to it. But look, it can be very lonely and especially very hard, I think, to do this if nobody around you is trying to do anything even remotely similar. And if you're getting just universally negative responses like I, very few people, I think, have very few people have the ego strength to be able to survive that for years. So I do think there's a huge advantage, and this is why you do see clusters. There's a huge advantage to clustering, right? And throughout history you've had this clustering effect, right? You had clustering of the great artists and sculptors in Renaissance Florence. You had the clustering of the philosophers of Greece. You had the clustering of tech people in Silicon Valley, you have the clustering of creative arts, movie TV people in Los Angeles and so forth and so on. There's always a scene, right? There's always like a Nexus and a place where people come together for these kinds of things. So generally speaking, like if somebody wants to work in tech, innovate in tech, they're going to be much better off being around a lot of people who are trying to do that kind of thing than they are in a place where nobody else is doing it. Having said that, the clustering has, it can have downsides, it can have side effects. And you put any group of people together and you do start to get groupthink, even among people who are individually very disagreeable. And so these same clusters where you get these very idiosyncratic people, they do have fads and trends just like every place else, right? And so they get wrapped up in their own social dynamics. And the good news is the social dynamic in those places is usually very forward looking, right? And so it's usually, I don't know, it's like a herd of iconoclasts looking for the next big thing, right? Isn't a class looking for the next big thing. That's good. The herd part, that's what you got to be careful of. So even when you're in one of these environments, you have to be careful that you're not getting sucked into the group thing too much.
