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“The great challenge in life: knowing enough to think you are right, but not knowing enough to know you are wrong.”
– Neil deGrasse Tyson
“Ideas are very fragile,” Sir James Dyson said in one of his letters The last interview.
He would have known, given the extraordinary determination he took to protect the very fragile idea he had spent his life pursuing: a bagless vacuum cleaner.
Initially, Dyson found it so difficult to raise money for his idea that he still owns 100% of Dyson Limited, the manufacturer of “cyclone” vacuum cleaners (which are actually much better than bagged ones).
Because such ideas are “easily discarded” by people who know how likely they are to succeed, Dyson warns would-be inventors and entrepreneurs that “experts are dangerous.”
He argues that experience not only adds knowledge, it adds reasons to 1) not try things and 2) stop trying difficult things.
That’s why he hires students as young as 17 to work at Dyson.
“If you’re experienced, you know why not to do something or how not to do something,” he explains. “But if you’re naive and a young engineer… you won’t have that negativity.”
Having endured such expert negativity himself, Dyson now appreciates the naivety he needed to ignore it.
“I like naivete, because it creates a different way of doing things, and we have to find different ways of doing things all the time,” he says.
Likewise, Henry Ford was universally told that his different way of doing things was not worth pursuing: the internal combustion engine could never compete with steam engines.
Ford insisted, of course, and steam engines were soon on the road to extinction.
“This is the way with the wise,” he wrote in his book. the biography. “They are so wise and practical that they always know why something cannot be done. They always know the limitations.”
Like Dyson, Ford favored employees with a “nothing is impossible frame of mind.”
“The moment one reaches the ‘expert’ state of mind.” to caution“A large number of things become impossible.”
Most of the time, these things are really impossible.
But the opportunity cost of not striving for the impossible is high: Dyson is now a $20 billion company, and Ford Motor Company still produces four million cars a year.
These unexpected success stories are proof that naivety and ignorance can be competitive advantages in the business world.
“If I wanted to kill the opposition by unfair means, I would give the opposition experts,” Ford joked. “They will have so much good advice that I will be sure they will do very little work.”
Startup investor Paul Graham makes a similar argument, preferring the naivety of youth over the expertise of experts.
“One of the reasons why young people sometimes succeed where adults fail.” He says“It’s that they don’t realize how incompetent they are.”
This lack of foresight allows young entrepreneurs to take advantage of a form of leveraged spending – and borrow confidence from presumed future success: “When they first start working on something, they overestimate their accomplishments,” Graham explains. “But it gives them the confidence to keep working, and their performance improves.”
Dyson, for example, overestimated his ability as an engineer, so much so that he thought it would just take him one General to build a commercially viable cyclone vacuum cleaner.
It took him 14.
If he had expected it, it’s unlikely he would have started at all – so it’s a good thing he didn’t do it naively.
“A more visible person would see their initial incompetence for what it was, and perhaps be discouraged from continuing,” Graham adds.
Dyson has never been frustrated.
“I woke up excited every morning,” he later recounted of the time he spent building 5,127 non-working prototypes. “Even though I knew it probably wouldn’t work, there was always a chance it could work.”
Never change, crypto
Cryptocurrency ideas are often easily dismissed — and often rightly so — like Luna, memecoins, and NFTs.
But I admire the industry’s enthusiasm, despite all expert advice, in repeatedly pursuing it.
Because enthusiasm, no matter how naive, sometimes pays off: Bitcoin, Ethereum, stablecoins.
Sometimes it’s an outdated idea that cryptocurrencies bounce back with seemingly no knowledge of past failures, as is the case with prediction markets.
Sometimes this is an idea that people naively refuse to give up, like Zcash.
All in all, it’s been a disappointing year for cryptocurrencies, but the recent success of things like prediction markets and Zcash is proof that the industry’s youth, inexperience, disregard for experts, and unrealistic persistence are all competitive advantages.
Cryptocurrencies in 2025 will not be as young as they were when, for example, Jay Bhavnani co-founded Rari Capital at the age of 18 in 2020.
The industry has become crowded with experts coming from traditional finance.
So perhaps you lose some of the naive advantage that Dyson, Ford and Graham appreciate.
But maybe there is a happy medium to be found?
Dyson was encouraged when people kept telling him that his idea for a new kind of vacuum cleaner would never work: “Whenever the idea was rejected, I knew I had something, because they never gave a good reason why.”
In 2026, many experts will still tell cryptocurrencies that they won’t succeed – often for good reasons.
Perhaps her success depends on the tasks she wisely ignores.
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