Einstein was insufferable. He was also right.

There's a story about Einstein as a student: he refused to accept any answer he hadn't derived himself. His professors found him insufferable, he found their certainty suspicious.

Not a bad instinct (within reason).

It reminds me of a pattern I see repeatedly: someone needs a tool for X. They ask around. They get an answer. They take it. The answer is whatever some LinkedIn guy with 80k followers is currently pushing, or what their favourite podcast host mentioned in passing, or what a competitor is using (as if a competitor's stack is a strategy they can just absorb by proximity).

They don’t ask why, or ask about the team size, the budget, the specific failure mode being solved, the migration cost, the three tools that got tried and ditched before this one. The influencer spoke. The post got 400 likes. That's the whole chain.

This is called borrowed certainty, and it’s endemic. It's how you end up with a 3-person-startup running enterprise tooling because some VC-backed company blogged about their stack.

But tools are situational. Notion might work for a team of 2 but collapse for a team of 40. The CRM a 500-contact-consultant uses might fold under the weight of 10000. The email platform built for monolingual US markets will cost you three times the labour in a trilingual European one.

The question to ask isn’t "do people I respect use this?”, it's "does this solve my specific problem, in my specific situation, with my actual constraints?"

Be more like Einstein. Do the work. Derive the answer yourself.

Colin