David Rowland wanted a better chair. It took him eight years to invent one. Then, plenty of rejections. Finally, a man named Davis Allen gave Rowland a chance: He ordered 17,000 of his 40/4 chairs for a university campus his firm was designing.
50 years later, it all seems obvious: Which company wouldn’t want a chair that stacks only four feet tall when you pile 40 of them on top of one another? But initially, different just seemed different, not better.
Rowland knew what he was doing. He wanted “better,” and he was willing to cycle through “different” as many times as he needed. In a 1965 interview, he admitted as much, leaving behind a maxim for us which might be even better than his chair: “Different is not always better, but better is always different.”
Our default approach to “better” is “more.” After we realize “different” is the way to go, we often still stray. It takes a thoughtful, deliberate kind of “different” to land on “better.” And even once we do, it may still require years of rejection and a stranger giving us a trust advance before the world can see: “Ahh, this is the ‘better’ we’ve been waiting for.”
“Different” is hard—but worth it. “More” is a socially acceptable dead end. “Different” offers no guarantees, but it’s the only road that might lead to “better.” Choose different. Try for better.