The Comfortable Lie
Most people aren’t honest about why they can’t learn new things. They blame a lack of talent, time, or inspiration—anything but the real reason: they’re too afraid of sucking at something long enough to get good at it.
The truth is simple: talent is just what people call it when they don’t want to acknowledge how many hours you spent being terrible at something. The difference between people who get good at things and those who don’t is that the first group spends a lot more time failing and figuring out why.
This isn’t about motivation or inspiration. It’s about looking reality in the face, embracing the mess, and doing the work.
Suck Early, Suck Often
When I was seven, I got my first lesson in how to learn things the hard way. My dad gave me an old decommissioned computer, and it was a lifeline—a way to escape the chaos of divorced parents fighting. The game Disney’s Tarzan was my sanctuary. So when it stopped working one day, it felt like the end of the world.
There was no one to fix it, so I spent months poking around blindly, trying to understand how anything worked. Config files felt like arcane magic, but after what seemed like endless trial and error, the game started again. That’s when I realized something fundamental: if you keep poking at something long enough, patterns start to emerge. Failure wasn’t a dead end—it was just the beginning of figuring out how things actually work.
The same was true for singing. My first attempts were a disaster—forcefully squeezed screeches that sounded like a teenager’s voice breaking. I hated how I sounded, but I kept going, mostly out of sheer stubbornness and a crush on Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails. I wanted to sing his songs, so I kept at it until I could.
That’s the first rule of learning anything: accept that it will suck at first and keep going anyway.
The Talent Myth
The most frustrating compliment I’ve ever received was someone looking at my software development skills—the company I built, the departments I ran, the projects I led—and saying, “Wow, I wish I could do something like that, but to me that doesn’t come naturally like for you.”
Hearing that made me want to slap them. They didn’t see the thousands of hours spent troubleshooting code at 2 a.m. or the endless nights rewriting things that didn’t work. They didn’t see the thousand-plus hours I spent improvising on the piano, making mistake after mistake until something started to make sense.
The irony is, when someone tells me they wish they had my talent, I usually respond by giving them a detailed, step-by-step manual on how to get started. They look confused and exposed, and then they start making excuses. I cut them off: “No, you can—you just don’t want to.”
The real problem is that people aren’t afraid of failure—they’re afraid of admitting how much work it actually takes. Talent is just a convenient lie people tell themselves so they can stay comfortable. The reality is that skill is what happens when you don’t quit.
Seeing in the Dark
Failure isn’t chaos—it’s feedback. Every time you fail, reality is giving you information about what doesn’t work. Quitting means throwing that information away before you’ve had a chance to use it.
But there’s more to it than that. Failure is like extending your hands into darkness. You reach out, and sooner or later, you hit something. Maybe it’s sharp. Maybe it burns. Maybe it hurts every time you try. But each time you reach out and make contact, you gather another point of data. Over time, all those bruises and burns reveal the shape of something unseen.
Eventually, if you keep at it long enough, you’ll know that object so well that you can navigate it as if you could see it. To others, it might look like magic—how you move smoothly, predict what’s coming, avoid the pitfalls. But it’s not magic. It’s just that you’ve built a map of reality point by painful point until it’s more familiar than the visible world.
That’s the real beauty of failure: it turns the unknown into something you can use. Every mistake is a pin in the map, showing you where not to go and, more importantly, what direction to try next.
Failure isn’t a verdict—it’s how you see in the dark.
Owning Your Bullshit
Here’s a confession: I procrastinate too—just not in the way most people do. I usually learn two things in parallel, so when I start bullshitting myself about one, I trick myself into making progress on the other. It’s self-deception at a higher level—bullshitting my way out of my own bullshit.
I know how that sounds. But the truth is, if you can’t admit to yourself that you’re full of shit sometimes, you’ll never get better. The most ridiculous excuse I ever made to avoid doing the hard work was convincing myself I was a Buddhist now and that my “spiritual advancement” was the reason I didn’t care about outcomes. It was self-delusion at its finest, and I saw through it in about a week.
The truth is simple: if you have time to watch five hours of YouTube a day, you have time to learn something useful.
Fail Smarter, Not Harder
The most important thing I learned from playing the piano wasn’t about hitting the right notes—it was about understanding human expectations.
Here’s the thing: you only know you’ve failed when something doesn’t sound the way you thought it would. Every mistake is really a hint about what people expect to hear next. If you pay attention, those wrong notes start to teach you the hidden rules of how humans process sound. You learn not just what doesn’t work, but why it doesn’t work.
And then something strange happens. You realize that those wrong notes can be more interesting than the right ones—if you use them on purpose. When you play a note that seems off but then weave it into the melody in a way that makes sense, you’re not just correcting a mistake—you’re showing that you understood the rules well enough to break them. It’s a way of tricking human expectations: making them think you’ve failed only to reveal, a moment later, that you hadn’t.
The difference between a mistake and a masterpiece is often just how long it takes to resolve the tension. Knowing when to lean into the dissonance and when to resolve it isn’t just a skill—it’s a language. And the only way to learn it is by making every mistake you can and paying attention to what each one teaches.
In the end, progress isn’t about avoiding mistakes. It’s about learning to use them.
Forget Motivation
Motivation is what gets you started—systems are what get you finished.
When I wanted to become a better writer, I forced myself to write for one hour a day without lifting the pen off the page. If I didn’t do it, I wasn’t allowed to go to sleep. I did this for a year. The first weeks were hell. Most of what I wrote was garbage, and every sentence felt like dragging a dead horse uphill.
But something happened. My brain adapted. Writing stopped being torture and started to feel automatic—like my mind had accepted that resistance was futile. That’s the power of a system: it works whether you feel like it or not.
Motivation hacks are for people who are still pretending they’ll start tomorrow. If you actually do the work, you don’t need hacks.
Shut Up and Get Back to Work
The world isn’t divided into talented and untalented people. It’s divided into people who do the work and people who make excuses.
If you’re not willing to be terrible at something today, don’t bother dreaming about being good at it tomorrow.
The most painful lesson I’ve learned about learning itself? That it hurts like hell. But the only way out is through.
Final advice? Shut up and get back to work.