Stubbornness might just be the most valuable trait a scientist can have.
Stephen J. Gould wrote many of his Natural History magazine essays on these sorts of scientists. The most notable example would probably be Louis Agassiz, who was enormously famous in their own time, but held out stubbornly against evolution, and most of these stubborn scientists today are mere footnotes if they are remembered at all. (Agassiz also was a huge player in scientific racism- his special flavor of the idea was that Black and White people- as Americans defined them- were separate species created separately by God. Again he held onto this idea long after it had gone out of vogue with the rest of the scientific community.) He was the head of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, was hugely prominent in his time, and his stubbornness in defense of wrong ideas is why he had his name removed from the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology and elsewhere.
It strikes me that nowadays that would result in outrage about "wokeness and cancel culture".
And those who defied something we know to be true now may have also done great work elsewhere before they made that mistake, and that stubbornness served them.
I dislike looking at those who win the fame lottery and trying to say they were never wrong and their opponents were never right. They just got one really big thing really right and stuck with it.
Looking at, say, Linnaeus attempt to categorize rocks in exactly the same hierarchical way that he was able to successfully categorize animals (1) reminds us that we are making the same sorts of mistakes, and that a century from now they will look back at our quaint beliefs about X, Y, and Z and say what fools that we are. But this is why stubbornness is a double-edged sword. Sometimes being stubborn means that you can see the truth when no one around you can, and sometimes it means that you are the person whose funeral causes science to advance one Planck unit forward. (2) The only difference is whether you are correct!
1: He didn't realize that Darwinian common descent and evolution were the reasons that his scheme worked for life- those ideas became commonly accepted almost a century after his death- and that rocks, not having any sort of common descent, couldn't be mapped into that sort of hierarchy. He himself didn't spend that much time on the subject, he mostly just asserted that they would fit into the same scheme because he was revealing God's True Law, and it would therefore have to be in rocks just like in living things, but several of his followers spent their lives trying to fit rocks into that same sort of scheme and it just fell apart every time.
2: Stubbornness is not necessarily related to age- there seems to have been no correlation between age and acceptance of either evolution or plate tectonics- so Planck's Principle is a little loose.
Not ashamed to say - I am not anyhow special re intelligence compared to my most of my uni peers, I struggled with memory too, a lot of endless rota. I was lets say above average on high school and thats it, facing same memory & non-stellar intelligence issues. So I learned to work longer on stuff, learning, everything, not giving up quickly, simply more patience. Saw this already on uni - bright folks were so unused to putting in effort from high school (which they coursed through effortlessly), they hit literal wall on uni.
At the end, I left most of those peers behind professionally, financially and life fulfillment wise, some non-easy choices with long term consequences. A lot of folks jump to their comfort zones way too early and eagerly. I've had some luck too but luck is just wasted chances if not prepared to seize them and take some risks.
When one hits those few crucial moments in life when big-consequence choices are done (which uni, which job, who to marry, where to settle etc), stamina can mean choosing more intense path with rewards in future, instead of going for the easy and a bit safer path from step #1.