You hearing from Others as You are Building The Next Thing
You’re not legit until they say it’s magic and then call it obvious.
~ Modfication from Isaac Asimov
First, Dear Reader, I trust everyone is safe. Second, this is a complete stream of thought blog on something that came up recently, where I was being asked how to deal with folks who said stuff can’t be done or haven’t seen something before. NOTE: Innovation and technology, by definition, should have a newness daily.
There’s a strange gravitational force that pulls on anyone trying to build something genuinely new a kind of cultural inertia that resists what hasn’t been seen before. We celebrate innovation in theory, but in practice? Most people discount it. Or worse — discount you.
This post is for the builders, the systems thinkers, the ones carrying the weight of complexity in silence. If you’ve ever heard, “I’ve never seen that before” delivered as an indictment rather than an invitation, read on.
The Myth of the Obvious
Once something works, clunks over, does the thing, once the architecture is stable, the performance is proven, and the interfaces are tight, much like the music of Black Sabbath, Parliament, or Frank Zappa, it’s human nature to simplify the original story retroactively. i call that ‘Its Just…”.
Oh yeah, that’s just container orchestration with some edge inference.
Sure, everyone knows you can zero-trust mesh across multi-domain enclaves now.
Except they didn’t. You showed them.
The hard part is that while you’re bleeding edge in development, the very newness of your work triggers skepticism. Worse, it triggers ego defense. People hear about your idea and subconsciously ask themselves:
If this is real, why didn’t I do it?
If this works, what does that say about what I’ve believed for the last decade?
The safer path? Deny its feasibility.
I’ve been doing this for years — it can’t be done.
And now you’re not just fighting entropy, architecture, and economics.
You’re fighting perception and belief systems.
The Psychological Tax of “Firsts”
Let’s talk about what that feels like.
You’re already navigating unknowns — choosing between imperfect APIs, reasoning through abstract architectures, testing on hardware that’s half-supported. And then someone, often well-meaning, drops this on you.
“If that were possible, someone would’ve already done it.”
“Never seen that work before.”
“Be careful — that’s not how we’ve ever done it.”
What they don’t understand is that you’re already careful. You’ve been awake at 2AM trying to thread DMA logic into a GPU queue while your KV cache is screaming and you are dodging kernel panics.
You’re not naive. Uncharted territory. Stack Overflow or ChatGPT ain’t got the info or vibe.
This is where impostor syndrome creeps in. You start internalizing external disbelief as internal deficiency. You begin to wonder if you’re wrong. But the truth is: most people don’t have a frame of reference for originality.
They mistake unfamiliarity for impossibility. They also say they attempted that or thought about that…
And that’s a trap.
He was turned to steel in the great magnetic field,
When he traveled time for the future of mankind.
Nobody wants him he just stares at the world.~ Iron Man, Black Sabbath
The Steve Jobs / Magic Mouse Lesson
By example, a story from Apple, one of those moments where the stakes were high and the illusion of impossibility cracked wide open.
During the development of the first Magic Mouse, Steve Jobs had a vision: a mouse with no physical buttons or scroll wheels, just a smooth touch-sensitive surface. When he explained this to the initial lead engineer, the engineer pushed back.
“It can’t be done.”
“The technology doesn’t exist.”
“There are too many trade-offs in latency, power, and user experience.”
So Jobs fired him the next day.
Brutal? Maybe. But here’s the kicker.
When Jobs interviewed the next engineer, he described the same exact vision. This engineer listened, paused, and said:
“Yeah. I think I can make that work.”
That second engineer didn’t have all the answers. What they had was permission to believe it was worth trying. That’s all Jobs needed.
Now we swipe and tap our input devices without a second thought as if it was always obvious.
Don’t Wait to Be Called Legit
The hard truth: You may never get validation at the time you most need it.
People will discount what they haven’t seen. They’ll tell you it can’t be done, not because they know, but because they’ve never tried. They’ll leverage tenure as a proxy for truth. And when does it work? They’ll rewrite history to make your risk look obvious.
That’s the price of being first. But it’s also a privilege.
Man say cannot be done should not interrupt man doing.
~ Old Confucious Proverb
Practical Reminders for Builders in the Arena
If you’re building the kind of tech that doesn’t fit into slideware yet, here are three things to remember:
- “I’ve never seen that” is not evidence it’s an opportunity. Let it sharpen your clarity, not blunt your will.
- Respect experience, but don’t let it define the boundary of the possible. Some of the most entrenched minds are blind to new methods. That doesn’t make them enemies. It just makes them witnesses to the past.
- The difference between “impossible” and “done” is someone deciding to try. If you have the skills, the team, and the drive, be that someone.
Final Thoughts: You’re More Legit Than You Think
The great irony of technological progress is that the more transformational the idea, the lonelier the early days. But the moment you stop building for recognition, and start building with rigor that’s when it shifts.
Not all legends are visible in real time. Some just look like people in hoodies ( or pajamas) at 1AM, squinting at kernel or prometheus logs, or creating those feature design documents..
So here’s to the Overclocked Misfits, Entropy Engineers, Code Renegades, and Full Stack Walkers, if you’re out there building what they say is impossible, then keep doing this: git push REMOTE-NAME BRANCH-NAME-With IMPOSSIBLE-CODE
You’re probably on to something.
Until then,
Ted ℂ. Tanner Jr. (@tctjr) / X
#iwishyouwater <- Monterey bay jellyfish cam doesn’t do it justice. you get a chance to go to the aquarium its insane.
Muzak To Blog By: “Memoir of a SparkleMuffin” by Suki Waterhouse – very lana del rey. love the title.