On the Three Deaths of good ideas
With some reflections on TikTok & "Need for Cognition"
“Ah, my boy – it’s not a good drug unless it’s been killed at least three times.” - Sir James Black
Last week, a product that I’d been trying repeatedly (and mostly unsuccessfully) to get funded while I worked at Twitter, finally launched.1 It was wonderful to see it in the wild a few years after I left, but the launch made me wonder - what could I have done differently to make this happen when I was still working there? Why did it take so long to finally catch on?
Last week I also got an email from a friend with the subject: “In case you haven’t seen this!” with just a tiktok link… Intrigued, I clicked, and it turns out that a tweetstorm I published in 2017 with no engagement suddenly get a ton of attention on TikTok! Why did this idea I’d tweeted five years ago suddenly catch on? What was it about the TikTok video that made it viral?
On reflection, I think both of these examples have the same root cause and it starts with the idea of the Three Deaths.
HOW EVERY GOOD IDEA DIES AT LEAST THREE TIMES
One of my favorite books is “Loonshots: How to nurture the crazy ideas that win wars, cure diseases, and transform industries” by Safi Bahcall. The book talks about how “loonshots” (really impactful new ideas) happen as a result of specific processes and organizational structures. I’ll write more about the book in future posts but for now I want to focus on a specific chapter that talks about “The Three Deaths.”
The term comes from when the author was complaining to Sir James Black about how hopeless a project he was working on seemed. Sir James Black is the recipient of the “1988 Nobel Prize in medicine for pioneering the modern approach to drug discovery” and he replied: “Ah, my boy – it’s not a good drug unless it’s been killed at least three times.”
Bahcall goes on to talk about how ideas are almost never obvious or accepted even the few first times they come about. Good idea die repeatedly:
In the real world, ideas are ridiculed, experiments fail, budgets are cut, and good people are fired for stupid reasons. Companies fall apart and their best projects remain buried, sometimes forever. The Three Deaths tells the honest history, as opposed to the revisionist history, of nearly every important breakthrough I’m aware of or have personally experienced (the Three often stretches to Four, Five or Ten).
As an example of the Three Deaths, Bahcall talks about Akira Endo whose research on fungi led to the discovery of statins, “the most widely prescribed drug franchise in history, saving millions of lives.” In the US alone statins “prevent half a million heart attacks and strokes each year.” However, it took a really long time for Endo’s ideas to become approved drugs.
Endo started actively working on the idea in 1971. When he first presented it no one came to hear his talk (Death #1 - idea was too weird). Luckily, he had a track record at his company so they let him run with the crazy idea for a while. However, his first animal studies didn’t work (Death #2 - he used rats instead of chickens so they didn’t have enough bad cholesterol). He then handed the project off to Brown & Goldstein (great researchers in University of Texas), the drug seemed promising but then the first safety trials seemed to cause cancer in dogs (Death #3). By this point Endo was retired and the idea seemed dead. However, Brown & Goldstein were skeptical and pressured Merck to restart their program with new safety studies. This worked out and in 1987 the FDA approved the drug. This was 16 years after Endo’s first talks! Oh, and by the way, Merck’s head of research got promoted, Brown & Goldstein got Nobel Prize but Endo was not really recognized broadly…
Bahcall then provides a few more drug examples to show that this pattern repeats all the time: Sir James Black’s beta-blockers took 7 years to push through; Judah Folkman’s research on starving tumors took 32 years!
A more recent example is the mRNA vaccine we all know well. Katalin Karikó spent decades being rejected:
Before messenger RNA was a multibillion-dollar idea, it was a scientific backwater. And for the Hungarian-born scientist behind a key mRNA discovery, it was a career dead-end. Katalin Karikó spent the 1990s collecting rejections. Her work, attempting to harness the power of mRNA to fight disease, was too far-fetched for government grants, corporate funding, and even support from her own colleagues…By 1995, after six years on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, Karikó got demoted. She had been on the path to full professorship, but with no money coming in to support her work on mRNA, her bosses saw no point in pressing on.
GOOD IDEAS ARE NOT OBVIOUS AND WILL DIE
It’s one thing to read these timelines and just say “yes of course these things take a long time.” But to really live these timelines is astounding - I can’t believe that in some of these examples people kept pushing for decades! When I was at Twitter if one of my ideas wasn’t recognized relatively quickly I’d get demotivated; the longest I pushed on an idea was three years and this was exhausting… Imagine 32 years! The patience!
Bahcall’s “Three Deaths” is a helpful reminder to reset my expectations: new ideas will die. If I have conviction, I need to stick with it. I don’t know if I have 32 years of patience, but I can definitely be a bit more patient than I have been in the past…
Another of Bahcall’s lessons is that one of the reasons that these scientists didn’t give up was because they didn’t see all the failures the same - they tried to understand why their attempts failed and distinguished false negatives from true negatives. Bahcall describes this as “listen to the suck” (where “suck” is failure):
[Listen to the Suck] means not only listening for the Suck and acknowledging receipt but also probing beneath the surface, with genuine curiosity, why something isn’t working, why people are not buying. It’s hard to hear that no one likes your baby. It’s even harder to keep asking why.
These are both important lessons for me but maybe more important than patience and expectations is having a good champion.
ON THE IMPORTANCE OF CHAMPIONS
When Bahcall walks through various examples of successful innovations, one pattern he finds is the presence of “champions” - people that will sell and push through the new idea. “The best inventors do not necessarily make the best champions. The roles require different skills not often found in the same person.”
The example Bahcall provides is the invention of radar where it almost died until it got a champion. The idea for radar was ignored multiple times and it wasn’t until William “Deak” Parsons jumped in:
[The original ideators] didn’t know how to package and promote a new idea, how to convince skeptical leaders, how to build support inside a reluctant organization.
No one seemed to recognize what was immediately obvious to [Parsons] … [He] circulated a proposal for $5,000 funding. He was stunned when it was rejected. The same skepticism that silenced [the original creator, Taylor] fired up Parsons. “With the persistence of a door-to-door-salesman,” Parsons took the idea to every head of desk in the Navy and made the case, putting his career at risk. Parsons reenergized the scientists at the naval lab - inspiring Taylor to assign the first engineer dedicated to the Project […] and he convinced top military brass to stand up and fight for the project. He prodded and poked until the sleeping bear woke.
Years later, both Vannevar Bush and Rear Admiral Frederick Entwistle, who oversaw antiaircraft protection for ships during the war, credited Parsons for operational radar being ready by the start of World War II.
Bahcall goes on to explain why champions are so important:
[Having champions] goes against the grain. On the creative side, inventors (artists) often believe that their work should speak for itself. Most find any kind of promotion distasteful. On the business side, line managers (soldiers) don’t see the need for someone who doesn’t make or sell stuff - for someone whose job is simply to promote and idea internally. But great project champions are much more than promoters. They are bilingual specialists, fluent in both artist-speak and soldier-speak, who can bring the two sides together.
As an aside, I think this concept of champions is one of the reasons that “more product-oriented CEOs” end up doing well. When strong CEOs are champions for ideas of engineers and designers, good ideas stand a better chance against corporate bureaucracy. The clearest example here is Steve Jobs and how he would be the champion for Steve Wozniak and Johny Ive’s ideas. Amazing idea + amazing champion is the killer combination.
ON NEED FOR COGNITION & MY TIKTOK CHAMPION
This all takes me back to TikTok and that tweetstorm I mentioned at the outset of the post.
The story starts in 2003 when I was in a psychology seminar at Stanford and I decided to focus on a concept called “Need for Cognition.” I’d found this idea in a textbook one day and I thought it explained something I could see all around me at Stanford: there were certain people that really liked to think for fun, and others for whom thinking was more of a means to an end.
Below are a few of my tweets explaining Need for Cognition, but better than my tweets I would encourage you to watch the TikTok about it instead since it does a much better job explaining it!
Here is the video → https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTResPo1H/?k=1
(I recommend taking a minute to watch it)
…
OK, many of you are now back. Here are some of the original tweets mentioned in the video:
Need for Cognition (NFC) is “a personality variable reflecting the extent to which individuals are inclined towards effortful cognitive activities.” More NFC, more appreciation of debate, idea evaluation; Low NFC people process information more heuristically 2/
Need for Cognition is *not* correlated with intelligence and is still subject to many biases (but more from over-elaboration vs. mental shortcuts). I.e., you’re not smarter, you just like to think more. 3/
People with Low Need for Cognition are more likely to agree with statements like: “Thinking is not my idea of fun” or “It’s enough for me that something gets the job done; I don’t care how or why it works.” 4/
Why did this go viral? I think it’s because Miriam (the TikTok creator) is so much better at explaining things than I am! She’s a better verbal communicator, she’s more expressive, she knows how to use TikTok as an expressive medium, she has great charisma. She’s amazing!
Almost twenty years after I became obsessed with the Need for Cognition concept and had effectively zero interest from friends, colleagues or Twitter followers, my tweets found their way into Miriam’s world and suddenly got 73,000 views and 11,000+ likes... The replies to the TikTok just go on and on about how much this idea resonated with people:
Developing ideas and finding connections & patterns is something that comes naturally to me. It’s one of the reasons I love having a newsletter since I get to share with you all :) However, getting a giant organization to embrace my ideas is something I often struggle with. This is probably a combination of long-term impatience with missing sales skills: the notion of waiting decades for an idea to finally be recognized pains me – my mind can’t fully escape the the fallacy that good ideas should be obvious (even knowing about the Three Deaths!). When I see the TikTok video above, I realize how amazing some people are at convincing others - it’s such a good lesson that I need to make sure I find the right champions to help my ideas take flight.
For those that are curious, this is the product I refer to at the beginning of the post: the idea started as an animated like button / exploding star for fun (Death #1 happened in 2016).
I saw it through rebirth a few years later (2018) as we spun it up for various holidays. We tried to expand it further since it generates amazing amounts of user joy as well as engagement. I tried selling it to anyone that would listen but it died Death #2.
After I left Twitter someone tried to bring it back again and then it went dark (Death #3).
And now, a couple years after, it’s a full revenue product:
