The best thing about all this is that we’re not even talking about an automotive company here. Sure, while some still insist on seeing Tesla as a car manufacturer and now begrudgingly accept that it’s not doing too badly thanks to its road map, it turns out that the price of batteries continues to fall, that demand for solar power installations grows as more and more batteries are produced and sold not only for vehicles but for homes and storage plants, and that hey presto, the company has miraculously found itself in one of the fastest-growing sectors as the evidence shows that long-standing environmental concerns are fully justified. Suddenly, it turns out there are many years of hard work behind Tesla’s overnight success. Forbes October 28, 2018. Guess what? Everyone was wrong about Tesla.

I’ve had a lot of folks tell me that what I was doing wouldn’t work. These claims always surprised me because very rarely did I ever use anything that I had not tried before in a prototype or limited fashion. After using some approach for some time I’d then inevitably start using it on a large visible project. The advantage was that it was then a proven approach and the only real challenge, the fun part for me, was if I could scale it to a larger effort.

There was admittedly always some satisfaction on my part seeing these naysayers speaking with such bombastic authority and expertise go wide-eyed and in some cases find an excuse to flee the room when they realized that it was not only working but that it had been successfully used in prior projects. These occurrences taught me that just because someone spoke impressively with credentials, assurance and convincing sounding expertise (especially in an area I felt I did not have expertise) that I needed to check whatever they said. Too often I came to realize that those who spoke the best and were the most convincing, often knew really very little except how to sound convincing.

See Why we don’t need all those experts and Making improvements that actually work

Are you letting the naysayers keep you from doing things the way you are fairly certain they should be done?