Hints and hacks

It’s tempting when learning something new to look for a hint.

Because then you can escape the friction of not knowing how to do a thing well.

Instead, you can fly on by. Forgetting that the route to mastery is a hard one, rife with the tedius rote of overcoming your own incompetence.

Of course, avoiding it won’t make learning it any easier. In fact, defaulting to shortcuts might even make it more difficult, not less.

That’s because the painstaking process of try, try, try again (until you find a solution) is the only way we learn to grasp much of anything.

It’s significantly easier to move forward by embracing the inevitable than trying to find a way around it.