But the first step is to recognize that you need both idea-push and market-pull in your company. The classic business school market-pull dogma shouldn’t be mindlessly worshipped. Yet, at the same time, there certainly is a place for market input, as ignoring customer input can lead to missed opportunities or disaster. Think of original breakthroughs as coming primarily (although not exclusively) from idea-push, and subsequent incremental innovations coming from customer input. The total amount of innovation is higher by using both approaches, rather than relying exclusively on one.

Reject the extremists. Reject those who say, “Always go ask the market what it wants first.” Remember, just because customers haven’t been asking for the innovation doesn’t necessarily mean that they won’t be thrilled when it’s offered to them. Also reject extremists at the other end of the spectrum who say, “We’re so good we never need to pay attention to the market; we always know what’s best.” Be receptive to ideas from everywhere, no matter what their origin.

There is an additional answer to the paradox: what appears to be purely idea-push is often just the opposite. Even though the inventor hasn’t done a general market analysis, he is often as close to the customer as he can get: he is the customer!

In subsequent research, they and other scholars found that people most disposed to creative breakthroughs in art, science, or any endeavor tend to be problem finders. These people sort through vast amounts of information and inputs, often from multiple disciplines; experiment with a variety of different approaches; are willing to switch directions in the course of a project; and often take longer than their counterparts to complete their work.

People often find potential more interesting than accomplishment because it’s more uncertain, the researchers argue. That uncertainty can lead people to think more deeply about the person they’re evaluating—and the more intensive processing that requires can lead to generating more and better reasons why the person is a good choice. So next time you’re selling yourself, don’t fixate only on what you achieved yesterday. Also emphasize the promise of what you could accomplish tomorrow.

Notice that Krieger and Systrom nailed the motivation component by choosing a behavior that people already wanted to do. According to the Behavior Model, they were already in good shape. That alone might have brought them some success. But what they did next catapulted them into the pantheon of Silicon Valley demigods—they made their Golden Behaviors easy to do.

Disruptive technologies, Christensen had observed, often grew out of hobbyist communities. They were developed using “bootlegged resources” in which “off-the-shelf components” were redeployed for something other than their intended purpose. They started out wonky but rapidly improved along attributes of performance that established players ignored.

But even once you had absorbed this lesson, it wasn’t easy to implement. Pursuing niche markets cost profits, making investors question your sanity. This, too, Christensen had foretold: “One of the reasons managers at established firms find it difficult to serve emerging markets is that their investors and customers tell them not to.”

That was the real secret of The Innovator’s Dilemma, which readers often missed. It was not a book about how to succeed; it was a book about how not to fail. Christensen’s book wasn’t a how-to for start-ups but a counterinsurgency manual for senior managers at stagnating firms. Thirteen years in, Huang felt that Nvidia was at risk of becoming such a firm, and it was as much paranoia as optimism that led him to pursue the mad-science market.