While I agree with this to some extent, I'd just like to comment on the the skateboarding analogy; You were probably taking it one step at a time, learning to stand on the board, increase your speed, make turns. Once you got all that done, you might move on to try some tricks, perhaps trying to learn the rock to fakie trick. What you _didn't_ do was, on your 2nd day, to scream out "why am I not sticking my 720 kickflip?!?!".
The latter is fairly common in the world of programming, in my experience.
(There's obviously also a big difference between being physically together with the people in a skatepark and sitting on the other end of an IRC session.)