You can't learn to swim by reading a book
This is a reminder to myself and thought it worth sharing here.
You can read all the books in the library, but that won't teach you how to swim. You can watch hours of tutorials, but that won't make you a swimmer. At some point, you have to jump in the water, submerge your head, and try not to drown.
Here's the silver lining: It usually works out. It’s not so different from diving into the latest rats nest of tech, github repos, and course-shillers on X.
Just like swimming, you can buy the best computer, the most advanced SaaS, and invest in cutting-edge tools. But these won't teach you LLM, Rust, or blockchain. Reading every whitepaper and attending all the webinars won’t make you proficient. Eventually, you’ll need to embrace the discomfort, face the challenge head-on, and start coding, breaking things, and iterating.
That initial plunge is often the most daunting. You'll make mistakes, and you may feel like you’re sinking. But it’s those early "losses" that begin to pay dividends. The sooner you take on the pain of starting, the sooner things begin to click.
Muscle memory isn’t just for athletes. In tech, repetition breeds familiarity, which breeds competence. What was once bewildering starts to make sense. The early confusion and frustration give way to understanding and proficiency.
This process hurts less over time. As progress happens, you start to realize the value of those initial struggles. It's through that hands-on experience—the countless hours of debugging, the late-night coding sessions, the failed prototypes—that you start to truly learn and grow.
Isn't that the essence of the startup journey? The willingness to leap into the unknown, despite the fear of failure? To learn not merely by observation but through direct, often messy, experience?
So, dive into the deep end. It’s the only way to really learn how to swim. And remember, most of the time, it will all work out.