[munin]

there is a dangerous tendency to say "someone told me my idea is dumb, but lots of smart people have had their ideas ridiculed and later gone on to success".

it's true, many good ideas have been ridiculed by simple minds. however, you never hear about "I had a dumb idea, people laughed at it, and then it went nowhere", and that has (probably) happened far more than the ridicule of world-changing ideas ...

so while it is probably useful to your ego and mental health to respond to negative criticism with "they just don't understand", you should probably be prepared to accept that your idea is just not that good ...

[dkarl]

It pays to consider your audience and how well you've presented it to them. Gödel mentioned his first incompleteness theorem in the presence of a bunch of mathematicians at a conference, and nobody present paid any attention to him, except John Von Neumann, who caught on immediately. Everybody else required a little more time (and a fuller presentation of the idea) before they understood what he was working on.

Whether we are Kurt Gödel or just some schmuck, I think it's fair to say that we all are surrounded by a fair share of idiots but know at least one person who is capable of understanding anything we understand, assuming we understand it well enough to explain it to them.

[kamaal]

That might happen once or twice, but if you are stubborn, you don't give up and keep trying.

Someday you would have run through sufficient iterations of failure/success and internal feedback loops. After some time by the virtue of all this the person will succeed.

[rokhayakebe]

* you never hear about "I had a dumb idea, people laughed at it, and then it went nowhere"*

Silent evidence.