The Crowd Always “No’s” Best
Friday, February 27th, 2009 by Mark | Posted in Unconventional Thinking | Comments
I had lunch the other day with a lovely woman I know whose husband died suddenly two months ago. He had been a passionate parachutist and even in the early days of their flaming romance that lasted nearly a decade, he told her that if he were ever near death, she should ignore the doctors, get him someplace where he could jump from the sky and let him die that way.
He even wrote it all out in a living will. This was a man who knew what he wanted including the ability to live life to the max even while it was ending. He had written his own swan song. This was the way it should be.
And then he fell ill unexpectedly and my friend got caught up in the machinery of the hospital and the moral platitudes of the medical hierarchy and to make a long and twisting nightmare of a story short, they talked her out of his last wish and he succumbed in a grey prison of a room that was as far as you can get from an endless blue sky.
In so much of life, the crowd thinks it knows best but what it is really best at is saying “No.” It strikes in matters of the heart. It invades the most glorious adventures. It destroys what had been the most dynamic and daring companies.
In business, the crowd loves to greet dangerous ideas (which is where the seeds of greatness are always planted) with a chorus of “No’s” :
* That’s way to risky.
* What if it doesn’t work.
* No one has tried that before.
* That’s not the way it’s done.
* Some people will be upset by the change.
No. No. No.
What the crowd doesn’t know, or doesn’t want to admit, is that crowds never accomplish a damn thing. They sit in judgement over passion, drive, exhileration, experimentation, creation and exceptionalism. 
At this moment in the greatest nation in the world, we are facing the confrontation between the crowd and the unconventionalist. The person who wakes up with an idea and carries on her back all the way to the marketplace risking her money and her job and her reputation because she thinks it can work. She believes in the individual’s ability to ring rings around the crowd and then build them better mousetraps and give them all jobs. She doesn’t want the crowd’s opinion because it always says “No.”
Once we leave college and transition from the mayhem of campus life to the institutions waiting to capture us the day after the graduation hangover, the forces of gravity want us to move, to live, in an ever smaller space. To say “No” to all of the dangers we yearn for because the crowd knows best.
Never believe it America. If you have to do it with your own force, walk out of your deathbed and fly through the clouds.
Mark Stevens
CEO
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