alt Hacker NewsWillingness to look stupid and intellectual self-confidence are two sides of the same coin.
If you can find internal (rather than external) reasons to trust/believe in your own intelligence and capabilities, it makes it easier to be willing to look foolish. Also, a lack of knowledge/ability in a new area (or even a familiar area) is not a sign of a lack of capability. There's a difference between being a novice and being an idiot. So long as your source of intellectual self-confidence is strong enough (say, you have made great intellectual achievements in some other area of your life unrelated to the thing you're struggling with right now) its irrelevant if other people think you the fool: they're simply mistaken, and that's no skin off your back.
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Someone (supposedly) published da Vinci's to do list a while back, and from the snippets I read he seemed to spend most of his time talking to experts about subjects he didn't know much about. Pretty telling if true.
Something I was told, very luckily I now believe, early in life is that for the most part we are all as smartish as each other, the only real difference is how much attention & time you're willing to pay to a particular thing(s). Yes, it's glib but I continue to believe it holds more truth than many of us would like to believe