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The title of Bill Lear's autobiography was "They Said It Couldn't Be Done"
Larry J — (archived)

I read the book in 1975 (this may be the same book). In it, he explained that when he came up with the idea of the 8-track, he was told that it was impossible to put more than 7 audio tracks on a single piece of recording tape. He proved them wrong. The book was full of examples where Lear, an 8th grade dropout, did things that experts said were impossible. One of his early inventions was the car radio. One of the key components of radios was an induction coil. According to his book, a world famous physicist had proven that it was physically impossible to make a coil of sufficient inductance that was small enough to use in a car. Lear made one anyway. When asked about it, he said that he was too dumb to know it couldn't be done, so he did it. Lear held some 150 patents in electronics and aviation when he died. I met his widow at Oshkosh in 1996. She was very pleased when I mentioned having read Bill's book.

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