If you learn how to cope with contrary colleagues early in your career, particularly in the competitive atmosphere of a lab, you will develop valuable coping and people-management skills that will serve you time and again, wherever your career path takes you.
Intellectually smart people sometimes analyze so much that they delay taking any action while creating for themselves a great deal of mental work and anxiety.
To many on the outside, life as a tenured faculty member conjures up images of dreamy afternoons spent theorizing at one's desk, interspersed with occasional trips to the lab to hold up test tubes to the light. Of course, anyone who's been to grad school for more than a week knows there's more to scientific endeavor than that. In fact, a faculty member's requisite skill set is quite extensive.