I can give you a counterexample anecdote from my own career: I have spent my entire career writing code mainly in Common Lisp. I have a long list of successfully executed projects, some of which were done in the face of directly competing efforts written in other languages which failed spectacularly. I have a "profound belief" in Lisp, and I can justify that belief with a litany of empirical data and theoretical explanations. Nonetheless, every single time I have ever expressed that belief it has led to my career advancement being cut off and ultimately to the loss of my position and having to start over.
So no, it's not enough to have "profound beliefs". You have to have the right kind of profound beliefs (unless you are extremely lucky -- see below). They have to not conflict too much with the profound beliefs of your management and co-workers because if they do you're sunk no matter how much data you have to back them up. That just turns out to be how the world works. I learned this lesson the hard way, and far too late in life for it to do me much good, but I thought I'd pass it along.
There is one exception to this rule, and that is if you just happen to get have iconoclastic beliefs that are also correct and you somehow manage to acquire the resources to act on those beliefs and the results you produce happen to find a large market. Steve Jobs is the poster child for this, and even he is a cautionary tale because his career very nearly ended when he was first fired from Apple. It was only the good fortune of Apple management being utterly incompetent that gave him a second chance, which he seized on to spectacularly good effect. But Jobs was literally one in a billion.
So no, it's not enough to have "profound beliefs". You have to have the right kind of profound beliefs (unless you are extremely lucky -- see below). They have to not conflict too much with the profound beliefs of your management and co-workers because if they do you're sunk no matter how much data you have to back them up. That just turns out to be how the world works. I learned this lesson the hard way, and far too late in life for it to do me much good, but I thought I'd pass it along.
There is one exception to this rule, and that is if you just happen to get have iconoclastic beliefs that are also correct and you somehow manage to acquire the resources to act on those beliefs and the results you produce happen to find a large market. Steve Jobs is the poster child for this, and even he is a cautionary tale because his career very nearly ended when he was first fired from Apple. It was only the good fortune of Apple management being utterly incompetent that gave him a second chance, which he seized on to spectacularly good effect. But Jobs was literally one in a billion.