Growing in figureoutability
"I can figure this out" is the best type of confidence
“One version of confidence is: I’ve got this figured out. Another version is: I can figure this out. The first is arrogant and close-minded. The second is humble and open-minded. Be humble about what you know, but confident about what you can learn.” – @James Clear
When I read this from James Clear’s newsletter, I immediately thought of my #decodingcoding journey. When I started learning coding, I thought being good at it means I got to have it all figured out. As a noob, that felt scary and daunting. Insurmountable, even. There’s so many languages, frameworks and libraries, and new ones emerging everyday. Even if I don’t seek to learn them all, reaching that level of “good” for just one language, like say Javascript, feels way hard too. Will I ever be able to build my own SaaS, I asked.
But that shifted many months later of concerted effort, when I had a glimpse of what it meant to feel that “I can figure this out”. Initially when I’m stuck, I had to ask friends for help all the time. I didn’t know how to search Stack Overflow. Even when I found useful results, I didn’t know how to apply it to my situation. There was no ChatGPT back then. But asking friends required a lot of good will, which I didn’t exactly enjoy. I hated troubling my friends. But I kept trying anyway. I gave myself a rule, that only after I’m stuck for 1-2 days can I ask a friend. So over time, I figured out how to figure things out on my own, and I asked friends less and less.
Maybe that’s how it is for indie hacking and entrepreneurship too.
I’m finding myself needing to learn a lot from others ahead of me. That’s why build in public Twitter rocks. But it’s not without problems. Context matters, and sometimes you learn the wrong thing, and it takes you on a time-wasting detour. But over time, I’m getting more discerning. And more confident that I can learn my own way out of problems, while taking cues from others with a huge grain of salt.
Everything’s figureoutable, if we put in the time to learn how to figure things out and grow our figureoutability.