I participated in a well known startup accelerator 10 years ago. One of the leaders was trying to help entrepreneurs by conveying how busy investors are and that if you have bullet points in your slide deck you will lose their interest right away. The person then proceeded to say: “You could have the cure to cancer and no one is going to listen.”
All I could think was: If someone walks up to you and has the cure to cancer, but they don’t sound like others or express themselves in ways that seem clear to you so you ignore them, you should not be holding the purse strings of innovation.
I mentioned this to an educator I admire deeply, an economist. He said: we see this all the time in education. The best educators recognize that neurodivergence and help it to thrive. They don’t ask it to conform to the thinking of the day.
I get the importance of this nonconformance. By definition, if you are inventing something truly novel, it does not conform to the current understanding. Incremental things conform. Transformative things bring something wholly unexpected from entirely different viewpoints.
You see this throughout art history as well. People confuse the momentary shock value of something insignificant but shiny with true transformation that changes the ways humans engage with a topic. The history of science presents so many examples of this social behavior.