Another “Brain Quirk” that the entrepreneur needs appreciate…
Jul 19th 2007NiaLLLarkinUncategorized
Earlier today I read and sent a link to this lifehack article into twitter-land.
Since that I’ve been reading about Charles Kettering, a fascinating man who invented the automatic ignition for cars, the spark plug, and the electric cash register among other things and whose name was taken by Kettering University.
He believed that the natural suspicion we all feel toward new things to be a basic quirk of the human brain.
Human beings are so constituted as to see what is wrong with a new thing, not what is right. To verify this you only have to submit a new idea to a committee. They will obliterate 90% of rightness for 10% of wrongness.
Obviously, given Kettering’s ability to translate inventions into innovations (ie ideas into products that the market embraced) he had the knack not only for solving technical problems but also for recognising and working around the problems/reality of human nature.Â
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