[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.