Beware the gulf of disapproval

Your new idea, your pro­pos­al to the com­pa­ny, your new ven­ture, your innovation—no one knows about it. Most of the peo­ple don’t get it, think it’s a risky scheme, a solu­tion to a prob­lem no one has or that it’s too expen­sive.

If you’re keep­ing track of all the peo­ple who hate what you’ve done, you’ll give up right here and right now. This is when the gulf of dis­ap­proval is at its max­i­mum. The num­ber of new fans (the blue line) is far small­er than the num­ber of well-mean­ing (but in this case, wrong) peo­ple on the red line.

If you per­sist, the val­ue cre­at­ed for the folks on the blue line begins to com­pound. And so your fans per­sist and one by one, con­vert some of the dis­ap­prov­ing. Per­son by per­son, they shift from being skep­tics to accept­ing the new sta­tus quo.

Gelezen bij Seth Godin als Beware the gulf of dis­ap­proval.