Order of European Inventors and Innovators
by Ileana Vlad, clinical psychologist and psychotherapist
In my practice I rarely hear anyone say «I am afraid to create». This fear almost never introduces itself by its real name. It sounds different: «I’m not the creative type», «my idea is silly», «better to keep quiet, so I don’t make a fool of myself». It passes for modesty, for realism, for common sense. In reality it is a barrier — perhaps the most effective of them all, precisely because nobody sees it.
What the fear of ridicule really is
Ridicule is a form of exclusion. Someone who is ridiculous is not contradicted, not met with arguments — they are simply removed from the ranks of those taken seriously. That is why the fear of ridicule is not a fear of criticism, but a fear of being left alone with your idea. Criticism can be discussed; laughter cannot.
Looked at closely, this fear has a function: it keeps us inside the group. The need to belong is one of the oldest human needs, and the threat of exclusion is treated by our minds with the same seriousness as physical danger. Someone who swallows an idea «so as not to seem absurd» is not making an intellectual calculation — they are answering a very old alarm.
The trap is that every truly new idea seems, at first, slightly absurd. If it did not, everyone would already have thought of it. The very quality that makes an idea valuable — its novelty — is the one that triggers the alarm.
How the barrier is built
Nobody is born afraid to create. The fear is learned, usually early and from small incidents: a «wrong» answer met with laughter in class, a drawing commented on with irony, a question greeted with «what on earth is going through your head?». Taken one by one, these moments seem unimportant. Together they lay down an unwritten rule: before you say anything, check whether it makes you ridiculous.
In time, the rule no longer needs other people. The judge becomes internal: the idea is rejected before it is spoken, sometimes before it is even thought through. In adulthood the barrier is not felt as fear at all — it feels like «realism»: I know it won’t work, there’s no point, it has been tried before. Other people’s laughter is no longer even necessary; we anticipate it so well that we never give it the chance to occur.
What weakens the barrier
This barrier is not torn down by will; it is worn thin by practice — and the practice is within anyone’s reach.
The first step is to name it. «I’m afraid this idea will seem ridiculous» is a far healthier sentence than «this idea is silly». The first describes an emotion, and emotions can be crossed; the second pronounces a verdict, and verdicts close the discussion.
The second step belongs to the first three seconds. The distance between having an idea and saying it out loud is usually decided in those seconds; if the internal judge speaks first, the moment passes. Whoever makes a habit of saying the idea quickly, imperfectly, «work in progress», most often discovers that others receive unfinished ideas far better than they feared.
The third step is taken from the other end of the table, and it is perhaps the most important: the way we receive other people’s ideas. «Tell me more» — three words that keep an idea alive in exactly the seconds when it is most fragile. A group in which ideas are met like that produces, over time, more than one that rewards the witty retort.
And where the fear of ridicule comes not from habit but from older wounds, an article is no substitute for a personal journey. It can be, at most, its beginning.
Why we talk about this on the site of an order of inventors
Because invention is the most exposed form of creativity. An inventor does not tell their idea to a circle of friends: they file it, they argue for it, they defend it in public, sometimes for years, often against general scepticism. The history of technology is full of solutions that seemed ridiculous until the day they became obvious.
A culture of inventiveness is not built out of laboratories and patents alone. It is also built out of the way we respond to other people’s ideas — in schools, in meetings, at the kitchen table. The public recognition of those who create, the mission of this Order, is also an answer to the fear of ridicule: it shows those who think differently that daring does not remove them from the community, but can place them at its head.