I've found that you can get surprisingly far in life simply by being willing to fix your mistakes and switch your bets once it becomes apparent you're wrong. I

I've found that you can get surprisingly far in life simply by being willing to fix your mistakes and switch your bets once it becomes apparent you're wrong. I initially dismissed the WWW as a disorganized mess when I first encountered it in 1994 - I liked Gopher better. By 1997 I had changed my tune and was all-in on learning HTML and CGI and even some of the new technologies like Java applets, RealAudio, and DHTML. (Note that Java and RealAudio were themselves eventually losers, but by then I was all-in on Javascript.) It felt like I had missed the boat in 1997; the dot com boom was in full swing and people were getting rich off much more sophisticated stuff all around me (TBF, I was in high school). But the WWW and Javascript/DHTML remained a lucrative career for 20 years afterwards. A lot of people, once they take a position on something, dig in and don't change that position for a lifetime, then miss out on the opportunity of a lifetime because they dismissed it to begin with. But truly world-changing ideas usually have a lot of room to grow. If you're wrong for 2-3 years and then change your mind, you'll feel really stupid, like you totally missed the boat, but that's nothing compared to the 20-30 years left of growth that the idea might have.