"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
- George Bernard Shaw
The most successful innovations, right from Einstein's Theory of Relativity to Tim Berners Lee's World Wide Web, have always come from people exploring ways of making the world behave the way they think it should.
Reasonable men, as defined by George Bernard Shaw, are the ones that look for a map, figure out what it takes to get to the next destination and then work hard to do that and get there. They are always looking to improve what they have to offer, becoming better at what they know and learning new tools and technologies, hoping to be more valuable in the job market.
But reasonable men always rely on unreasonable men to hire them. If you're reasonable, you end up adjusting to the way the world works and accepting the status quo. It takes an unreasonable man to question the status quo and possibly create jobs for reasonable men in the process.
Despite this, being unreasonable, on it's own, is not a virtue. Or the reasonable men would easily learn the tricks of the trade and emulate, as is their strength. It takes a disregard for convention in addition, in order to put the unreasonableness to work.
For only when you persist in trying to adapt the world to yourself will progress and advancement occur.
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