The advancement of the human race depends on unreasonable people, the playwright George Bernard Shaw said in his Maxims for Revolutionists at the end of Man and Superman : "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

Entrepreneurs have often been seen by their contemporaries as unreasonable. Think of Henry Ford, paying workers twice the going rate to mass produce identical black cars by the million. Or the pioneers behind low-cost airlines such as Southwest Airlines and Ryanair who launched discount flights with none of the frills offered by traditional carriers. Or Sir James Dyson, inventor of the bagless vacuum cleaner, who had to create his own company to make it.