At one point I blogged about “What it takes to Go Big.”

I’ve learned a lot since that post. Especially about bravery. By bravery, I  mean, pulling away from the crowd to face serious danger or pain. It’s one of those things, like most, that’s easy to armchair quarterback from the pack, but until you’ve done it– professionally or personally– you can only pretend to know it.

New companies face this every hour. The rest of the market says, “stop. you will get eaten.” You must be crazy, you will fail, close, never make it. Sometimes other companies even try to attack, to try to stop  you. The same thing can be said personally, when you pull yourself away from your group. They wonder what’s wrong with you, question you and try to pull you back to the norm.

You know those helicopter shots of herds of animals on the Discovery Channel?

As soon as you see one of those animals veer off, you think, “that’s the one that will die.” And you’re right. The company or person who veers off, risks everything. They’re a pinata for us to beat. And everyone loves candy. But breakthroughs come from ignoring that inner voice. The one that tells you to stay home on the couch. That tells you to lean back on your skis.

Below is one of my favorite blog comments. It was from Brent Britton in response to What it takes to Go Big. It’s amazingly well-written:

We’re stuck with some evolutionary baggage. We come from schools of fish and herds of animals for whom sameness is a survival skill and standing out from the crowd gets you eaten. So we have evolved a pleasure response to our own conformity. Fitting in to our peer group evokes a sense of comfort. Somewhere deep within our brains lies machinery that makes us really dig flocking.

Choosing to innovate requires overcoming the visceral desire to just sit down, shut up, and accept the status quo like everyone else.

Evolutionary disdain for radical behavior works outwardly too; we instinctively fear and loathe the behavior of our peers when it runs too far afield of the norm. And we have no qualms about letting them know it. This kinship-based weirdness suppressor is an evolutionary backup to keep us in line if we can’t self regulate as individuals. When people have too many different ideas, we think they’re crazy and we tell them so. Witness the very epithet “mad scientist.” Heck, witness how any group of teens treats a nonconforming peer. When Fulton proposed the steamboat, they called it Fulton’s Folly and they said it would never work. After all, why put a steam engine on boats when we’ve got reliable, centuries-old sails and oars? I have no doubt that when the first of our kind tried rubbing two sticks together in an effort to make fire, the rest of us stood around making fun of him and probably suggesting he was in league with Lucifer. We cannot conceive of our own place in a world that is marked by the change that innovations represent. Just ask the 19th century oarsmen that Fulton’s incredibly useful steam engine put out of work.

To innovate successfully, you’ve got to ignore the slings and arrows of critics. You’ve got to get yourself spending time around people who appreciate weirdness and smartness and who value new ideas because they are new. You’ve got to remember that pretty much everyone who ever said it couldn’t be done…about anything… was wrong.

My advice? Avoid lizardry. Yes, you’ve got this paleocortex in the back of your head insistently pumping out the signal that you are a fearful little ball of nerves just desperately trying to avoid getting eaten (because your paleocortex knows that you are crunchy and good with soy sauce). But for several hundred thousand years you and the rest of your kind have been toying with how to use this other rather nifty hunk of jelly right behind your forehead. The highly organized electrochemical potentials in your cerebral cortex have paved the way for all sorts of useful skills, such as choosing whether or not to supersize it, for example.

And also to decide whether or not to actually give voice to the signals coming out of your lizard brain or push through them to become the star you are, star.

Your evolutionary fears are but a subset of the whispering winds luffing through your sails. Choose to ignore them and boldly go.

In starting Blackbox Republic, I remember our PR Agency asking me if I was ready for all the personal and professional attacks I’d receive. They warned me that all the vocal nuts, from the Conservative Right to Joe Blow, would shake their evangelical sticks at me, call everyting I’m doing into question and yell foul. I told them what I’ll tell you. I believe, like they believe. Just in something different. I can’t think of anything better to do than to break through. To start something meaningful. To find your tribe-mates, your “company.” No matter how small or big. Eaten or not.