Why We Resist Other People’s Ideas

Key points

Reinventing what already works wastes time that could be spent building something better.

We often tie our work to our identity, so outside ideas can feel like personal threats.

The cure for Not-Invented-Here is a culture that reward curiosity and welcomes ideas from anywhere.

Torpenhow Hill, a place in England, is famously a quadruple tautology: “Tor,” “pen,” and “how,” all mean “hill” in different languages, so “Torpenhow Hill” essentially translates to “Hill-hill-hill Hill.”

Each new group of settlers felt compelled to rename the place in their own tongue, and each of them drew inspiration from it looking like a hump. Cultures that passed through the region added their own word for “hill”: tor from Old English, pen from the Celtic, how from Norse, and finally hill