"Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn." — Benjamin Franklin

Learning by doing isn’t revolutionary—it’s been around since the first human picked up a stone and discovered fire. Yet, in today's fast paced world, this truth often feels forgotten.

If you know me in real life, you probably know I do a handful of things. Now don't get me wrong, I do not consider myself an expert at anything. However, one thing that has been proven to me in various points of life is that specialization is for insects, and true strength comes from generalization. Maybe I'll write about the hundreds of events where concepts from one completely unrelated field helped me in another field, but that's for another day.

I have been walking on this planet for only two decades as I write this. The average age of the human species in 2024 is 30.6 years [1]. So I am still an unexperienced young whippersnapper, according to statistics. But in these two decades, I have learned a fair deal about computers, technology, artificial intelligence, hybrid intelligence, software development, electronics, communication technology, mathematics, quantum physics, aviation, flying planes, chess, military strategies, cyber security, project management, business models, healthcare, mental health...

By "learned about" I do not mean "I have an idea about", no, I have ideas about way more than I can remember right now. By "learned" I mean I am confident enough to speak about these topics to someone who specializes in them, and I guarantee I won't sound like a fool. By no means again, I'm an "expert" in any of these, but I do think owning a full HOTAS replica of TCA Thrustmaster Airbus Edition, foot pedals and a flying stick, along with a few hundred hours of flying in VATSIM gives me bragging rights to call myself an "aviation enthusiast." I used this as an example, but I am a nerd and confidently an "enthusiast" in all the fields I mentioned above, and maybe even more.

If you are reading this, you are probably just like me. You also probably have some, or at least one very obscure field that you know a lot about. And by "a lot" I mean A LOT! It might be rocket science, it might be knowing how to perfectly boil the noodles every single time you do it, that does not matter. But I'm sure you are special, and the thing you are good at, is very unique among your peers.

What I also guarantee is, the thing you are really good at, you probably did not learn at school, or any course, or any single youtube video. You probably spent HOURS behind it, maybe knowingly, maybe unknowingly. That 43-minute documentary you watched last Friday about how the International Space Station will be disassembled? Or that Monday you were bored in class so you clicked through 37 Wikipedia articles about the Aztec Empire? Yes, we count them too. You may not realize it now, but every single thing you do, consciously or subconsciously makes you a smarter person, a nerd, an "enthusiast", even if you deny it.

Let's come to the main point

The perfect time to learn something: will never come.

We are always learning. Human brains are amazing at picking patterns where there aren't any, and bad at learning patterns which are forced to be there.

I started making websites as long as I remember using the internet. At first of course, those were local sites made by Vanilla HTML, CSS (we really have come a full circle haven't we?) I wanted to become rich by making websites for other people, and the first actual website I made and published was for my clan in an online game. Was it pretty? No. Was it functional? Maybe. Did I watch an online youtube playlist on how to make websites? Yes. Did I learn something from that video? No.

What had happened was, in that "competitive" game, the clan members had to share some "images" of enemy bases with the entire clan. Kind of like spy reports. Mind you these were before discord was a thing. Back then the only platform for gamers was probably TeamSpeak, and other social media like kik or Facebook Messenger. And sharing tens of these images every two or three days and finding them there was horrific. Google drive was the only other option. But I decided to just collect the images from everyone and upload them to a folder in a website. But then there was the second issue, how do i make this website public?

After days of research, I finally understood from googling, I need a website hosting provider, and I need a domain. I finally found a provider somewhere in Tokelau, who would give anyone, ANYONE a free .tk domain. This was revolutionary for me. I also found a very shady website that would allow you to host your own website for free, which I'm not gonna link here because, shady. It took a while, but finally the website was up! Everyone could see the images! I mean, yes the web hosting provider was slower than numpy's convolution algorithm, and there were occasional malicious redirects to ad providers, and the website could only be viewed on a desktop as it was not mobile responsive, and the domain looked like a spam site and was actually being blocked by many antivirus and firewalls, and ... hundreds of other issues.

But. It. Does. Not. Matter.

In fact, no one even bothered to visit the website. Turns out people play games to have fun, well most people. No one has the time or effort to check a website that takes 10 years to load every week for something that can be resolved by just scrolling the group chat a bit, or asking someone in the chat. It's more fun that way even. But hey, It does not matter. In those few days, I learned about domains, web hosting providers, shared hostings, DNS, a country named Tokelau, and hundreds of other things. And some of these things, I still use TO THIS DAY! I used the .tk domains for various other future projects to get a quick and dirty domain up, one of which earned me my first salary. I found a way to share my creations with the world. I understood how the modern web works. I finally created something from my house, which could be accessed from every where else in the world. That's what matters.

Had I followed a 12 hours youtube tutorial on web development and thought to myself, Hmm, now i know how to make websites, none of these would have happened. Maybe I would have understood some things, but not at this level.

Mistakes are maps!

Every mistake is a marker. A guidepost. A place you thought was the end but turned out to be a lesson. Throughout my life I have deleted production databases, wrote insecure code, got banned from games, pushed buggy code to production, crashed websites, ruined a hard drive, destroyed bunch of electronics and much more. And I'm not ashamed of any of it, if anything, I'm proud of them. Deleting a production database of 2100 user records taught me about server snapshots, backups, transactions in SQL databases. In fact I even knew about these technologies, but never actually used them because... well I was a kid, an "enthusiast". Those are only for professionals right? And then I actually understood their importance, and now I manage production database and code of products used by thousands of people every day at my job, and I am confident I set the redunancies and backups properly. Mistakes taught me more in 5 minutes what 500 youtube tutorials did not teach me in 40 hours.

Progress, not Perfection

I'm an engineer. We are responsible for progressing the world. But often times, we get stuck in the perfectionist trap. Learning by doing is not about perfection. It’s about progression. Moving from knowing about something to actually doing something. There are thousands of problems in this world. We all know it's not perfect. But it does not have to be perfect, we just have to progress, keep up as the universe keeps throwing us challenges.

  • Want to understand a concept? Teach it.
  • Want to master a skill? Fail at it.
  • Want to grow? Build something you are not ready to build.

Minimal effort. Maximum learning. One step. One project. One mistake at a time.