You’re not crazy. You’re just early

Being early is hard. It’s lonely. It’s exhausting.

It's something that a lot of people can't do;
Trying is hard, that's why people don't do it;
Losing is hard, they can't make it through it;
But not you.

You're going on no evidence;
You don't listen to common sense…
You’re called a crank.

“Sure, Jan,” they say. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

But that’s not belief. That’s not even skepticism - which is healthy – it’s cynicism, and that is unforgivable.

So fuck them.

Just stay the course. Go the distance. If you build it, they will come – and when they arrive they’ll say, “I knew you’d do it all along.”

And when they do, say nothing. Just smile and walk away.

Because people who reveal themselves in pettiness have no greatness to conceal.

But you are great.

So…Just. Keep. Going.

The doctor who saw death on unwashed hands

Ignaz Semmelweis couldn’t understand why so many women were dying in childbirth—until he noticed that doctors were moving straight from autopsies to delivery rooms. He introduced handwashing. Mortality dropped. But the medical establishment rejected his idea. Called him unstable. He died in an asylum. Years later, germ theory proved him right.

The accountant who called bullshit on Enron

Jim Chanos read Enron’s public filings and saw a house of cards. No one believed him. Wall Street laughed. The stock hit $90. Then it collapsed to zero. Everyone else had hype. He had math.

The woman who invented Monopoly to fight monopolies

Elizabeth Magie designed a board game to warn people about landlords and concentrated wealth. Her message was buried, her name erased. Parker Brothers stole the mechanics, kept the greed, and rewrote the rules. But the original game—the real game—was a warning, not a celebration.

The writer whose ‘nonsense’ changed literature

Franz Kafka barely published in his lifetime. His work was dismissed as bizarre, unreadable, absurd. He asked for his manuscripts to be burned. A friend ignored him. Today, we use the word Kafkaesque to describe the very systems he was ridiculed for exposing.

The bicycle mechanics who built a flying machine

Everyone laughed at Wilbur and Orville Wright. Reporters refused to cover their test flights. The New York Times predicted it would take “one million to ten million years” for man to fly. Two years later, they were in the air. Two years after that, the military came calling.

The programmer who saw the future of money

Hal Finney downloaded the first version of Bitcoin from Satoshi Nakamoto and mined the first coins. People mocked it. Called it a toy. A scam. A joke. Today, his name is etched in every blockchain archive. He couldn’t walk or speak by the end—but he saw the future first.

The mathematician who cracked the German war code

Alan Turing built the machine that broke Nazi encryption. He saved millions of lives. After the war, he was convicted of “gross indecency” for being gay. He died by suicide. In 2009, the British government finally said thank you. Too late.

The analyst who warned about the Challenger

Engineer Roger Boisjoly begged NASA not to launch the space shuttle Challenger. He said the O-rings would fail in cold weather. He was ignored. Seventy-three seconds into flight, the shuttle disintegrated. Afterward, he was vilified for speaking out. And he was right.

The climate scientist they tried to silence

James Hansen testified to Congress in 1988 that global warming had already begun. He was attacked, censored, ridiculed. Decades later, every data point backs him up. The signal was clear. It was the world that wasn’t ready.

The woman who made a space telescope happen

Nancy Grace Roman fought tooth and nail at NASA for a space-based observatory—something most dismissed as science fiction. They called her “the mother of Hubble.” But not until the images came back did they understand what she’d done: she gave humanity a window to the beginning of time.

The patent clerk who rewrote physics

Albert Einstein couldn’t get a university job. He worked in a Swiss patent office, scribbling equations on scrap paper. His ideas on relativity were rejected as “fantasies.” A few years later, those fantasies rewired the universe.

The scientist who told the truth about Big Tobacco

Jeffrey Wigand was a high-level executive at Brown & Williamson, one of the “Big Three” tobacco companies. He discovered the company was intentionally manipulating nicotine levels to keep smokers addicted. When he pushed back internally, he was isolated, threatened, and ultimately fired.

CBS almost refused to air his whistleblower interview because the legal risk was so high. The industry attacked him ruthlessly — character assassination, lawsuits, intimidation. But Wigand held the line.

When the story finally broke, it triggered investigations, lawsuits, and the Master Settlement Agreement — the biggest civil settlement in U.S. history. The truth he carried alone for years became a national reckoning.

The Black seamstress who refused to move

Before Rosa Parks, there was Claudette Colvin—15 years old, arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus. Her act of defiance preceded Parks by nine months. The movement wasn’t ready for her. She was early.

The lawyer who forced America to build safer cars

Ralph Nader was a young, unknown attorney when he published Unsafe at Any Speed in 1965. He argued that the auto industry was knowingly selling cars with fatal design flaws — especially the Chevrolet Corvair — and choosing style over safety. Detroit fought back hard. General Motors hired private investigators to follow him, tap him, track him, even attempt to entrap him with women.

They tried to break him. They failed.

Congressional hearings followed. Seat belts, blowout-proof tires, collapsible steering columns, and dozens of other safety standards were adopted because one man wouldn’t shut up when everyone told him to.

The car companies painted him as a crank. History painted him as the reason millions of people are alive.

The artist who painted like no one else

Vincent van Gogh sold one painting while alive. One. His “style” was considered crude, childish, wrong. Today, he’s one of the most recognizable visual voices in human history.

The woman who saw radiation before anyone believed it existed

Marie Curie believed invisible rays were real. The scientific establishment doubted her. She persisted, isolated samples, proved it, named it, and discovered two new elements. She won two Nobel Prizes. Still the only person to win in two different sciences.

The musician everyone thought was washed up

Johnny Cash played to half-empty auditoriums in the early 1990s. Critics wrote him off as a relic. Then Rick Rubin stripped everything back — to black – just Cash and a guitar. Suddenly the world heard the truth. His last albums defined a generation.

The coder who built the world’s first web browser

Tim Berners-Lee pitched the idea of linked documents—a “world wide web”—to colleagues at CERN. They didn’t get it. “Too abstract,” they said. Thirty years later, we live inside the thing he drew on a napkin.

The woman who saw dark matter in the stars

Vera Rubin measured the rotation of galaxies and saw something impossible: stars were moving too fast. Her data proved the existence of dark matter. Men in her field dismissed her findings. Today, dark matter is one of the pillars of cosmology.

The mathematician who discovered chaos

Edward Lorenz found that tiny changes in initial conditions create wildly different outcomes—the butterfly effect. His colleagues told him he’d made a rounding error. He hadn’t. He’d discovered a new branch of science.

The athlete who refused to be silenced

Billie Jean King was told women’s tennis wasn’t worth watching. She organized the “Original 9,” created her own tour, and demanded equal prize money. They laughed. Wimbledon and the U.S. Open now pay men and women equally because she wouldn’t shut up.

The man who saw the internet before the internet existed

Vannevar Bush imagined a machine called the “Memex”—a desk-sized device that could store and link all human knowledge. People thought it was fantasy. His paper inspired the hyperlink, the browser and the web itself.

The journalist who showed the world Auschwitz

Edward R. Murrow broadcast the first uncensored reports from liberated concentration camps. Executives warned him it was "too graphic" and “too emotional.” He insisted. His words forced the world to confront truth.

The woman who said computers could be more than machines

Ada Lovelace wrote the first algorithm—100 years before computers existed. Her peers dismissed her work as “poetry.” Today she’s considered the world’s first programmer.

The economist who predicted the Great Depression

Roger Babson warned in 1929 that markets were wildly overvalued. He was mocked as pessimistic. The crash came weeks later. He was early—painfully early.

The astronomer who mapped the universe alone in a basement

Henrietta Leavitt, a low-paid “computer,” discovered how to measure galactic distances using variable stars. Her discovery made modern cosmology possible. Her male colleagues took the credit. Her data reshaped astronomy.

The engineer who refused to compromise safety

Niels Bohlin designed the three-point seatbelt at Volvo. He could have patented it. Instead, Volvo released it freely to save lives. Car companies mocked it. Today, it’s saved over a million people.

The woman who proved the universe is expanding

Frieda Zellerbach studied Edwin Hubble’s data and argued the universe wasn’t static. Her insight was dismissed until Hubble himself confirmed it. She never received formal recognition.