If this cat crosses your path your creative idea is doomed.
There’s a cat written up in a recent edition of The New England Journal of Medicine that can foreshadow death. The feline, Oscar, hangs around the halls of the advanced dementia unit in a nursing home in Rhode Island. If Oscar camps outside a patient’s door, well, that patient isn’t long for this world.
How accurate is this cat at predicting death? According to the nursing home’s staff, he’s never wrong. Never.
When I first read this, not to make light of the fate of these patients, nor this animal’s gift, but I thought, “wouldn’t it serve many of us if we got a strong signal that one of our ideas were doomed before we proceeded to put a lot of effort or money into it?”
That was my first thought. My second thoughts were, “don’t we already have too many death cats?” and, “aren’t they wrong a lot.”
Think about it. You have a new idea and start sharing it with people. If it’s truly a new idea, something that’s never been done before, what are the reactions? “It’ll never work.” “We could never do that.” “They’ll never approve it.” Death cats all of ‘em.
New ideas, again, truly new ideas, very frequently seem to get the meow of doubt from less imaginative people. New ideas, almost by definition don’t make sense in the old order, so people find it quite easy to reject them out of hand.
In my book, The Do-it-yourself Lobotomy, I have a chapter called “Stop making sense,” where I discuss many big ideas that received the ol’ death meow when first articulated. These are ideas that went on to be extremely successful, but in their raw, unproven form they were seen as anything but pur-r-r-fect.
The airplane. In spite of some horrible trends in on-time reliability and service of commercial flights, the airplane has been a world changing invention. So, after decades of imaginative people like da Vinci and Newton dreaming about manned flight, when the Wright brothers finally got their flying machine off the ground, do you think there was a single captain of industry in America who saw the potential for moving people and goods from city to city? Not a one. The Wright brothers wound up selling their patent to a French businessman. (Maybe the death “meow” doesn’t translate.)
The longest running TV show of all time, 60 Minutes, nearly didn’t make it to the air because network executives thought producer Don Hewett’s concept of a news show in prime time was a bad idea.
Those creative executive at Motown records resisted Marvin Gaye’s recordings that made up his “What’s going on?” album. “Meow, meow, meow,” they said, “protest songs are for Dylan types, we’re about R&B, music you can dance to.” If not for Gaye’s persistence the huge-selling, award-winning record and all R&B message music might never have reached our ears. And where would that leave some of today’s best hip hop?
No. While a death predicting cat might be helpful to hospital staff, I don’t think we need any premature reports of an idea’s mortality. New ideas are vulnerable enough. Hell, maybe the meows of doubt should be thought of as indications of an idea’s creativeness, not it’s doom.
Come on Oscar, check out my new idea any time you want. Just stay away from my bedroom door.
