You can try to gently disprove someone's misconceptions but it's easier to help them do so themselves. Whatever you do you can't batter their door down with log

You can try to gently disprove someone's misconceptions but it's easier to help them do so themselves. Whatever you do you can't batter their door down with logic and facts, unless they're a truly scientific type; ideally, there's some harmless proving ground, or solid analogy, that can open their eyes to the reality of the situation. Like if someone is saying "I'll just start a social network and be the next Zuckerberg", get them to read a book on the history of Facebook and another on why things fail, get them to start a Ning group and really experience a "safe" failure. I often find myself as the voice of reason/realism among starry-eyed people, but it's quite fun helping people work out that actually they can get to where they want, even though their assumptions were totally wrong.