Unfortunately, if you want to do new things, you'll face a force more powerful than other people's skepticism: your own skepticism. You too will judge your early work too harshly. How do you avoid that?

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

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.

We just don't have enough experience with early versions of ambitious projects to know how to respond to them. We judge them as we would judge more finished work, or less ambitious projects. We don't realize they're a special case.

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.

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

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

This is a difficult problem, because you don't want to completely eliminate your horror of making something lame. That's what steers you toward doing good work. You just want to turn it off temporarily, the way a painkiller temporarily turns off pain.