Of course, inexperience is not the only reason people are too harsh on early versions of ambitious projects. They also do it to seem clever. And in a field where the new ideas are risky, like startups, those who dismiss them are in fact more likely to be right. Just not when their predictions are weighted by outcome.

But there is another more sinister reason people dismiss new ideas. If you try something ambitious, many of those around you will hope, consciously or unconsciously, that you'll fail. They worry that if you try something ambitious and succeed, it will put you above them. In some countries this is not just an individual failing but part of the natio... See more

It will be easier to try out a risky project if you think of it as a way to learn and not just as a way to make something. Then even if the project truly is a failure, you'll still have gained by it.

One motivation that works particularly well for me is curiosity. I like to try new things just to see how they'll turn out.

One way to do it is to study the histories of people who've done great work.

Imagine if we could turn off the fear of making something lame. Imagine how much more we'd do.

It also helps, as Hardy suggests, to be slightly overconfident. Because this error compensates for other sources of error in the opposite direction: being slightly overconfident armors you against both other people's skepticism and your own.

If you overestimate the importance of what you're working on, that will compensate for your mistakenly harsh judgment of your initial results.

It can help if you focus less on where you are and more on the rate of change. You won't worry so much about doing bad work if you can see it improving. Obviously the faster it improves, the easier this is. So when you start something new, it's good if you can spend a lot of time on it. That's another advantage of being young: you tend to have bigg... See more