2026-07-25

Permission to suck? Granted.

I've been watching/listning to John Green's book signing streams while learning today. It's the perfect mix of background noise with the scratch of the marker and low mental effort chatter with the occasional gem of advice or wisdom.

On one of the streams he said "You should give yourself permission to suck."¹ His context, of course, was in writing, but it applies to nearly every skill we develop. We always suck the first time we learn something by new, but we get better by practicing; that's obviously how we develop new skills, but we still get stuck in our mental states thinking "I should be better at this" or "I should have learned this a long time ago."

But - no. It's okay. We all learn at our own pace and we're all on different paths and our skills are an accumulation of our efforts throughout our whole lives. No single person has the same journey, no one's experience is any less valuable than anyone else's, and we're not less-than because we haven't all followed the same path.

To the contrary - a diversity of experience is necessary and should be celebrated. We'd get nowhere in this world if everyone had the same skills.

In the tech space, we err on the side of favoring the perfect developer - the person who knows every nuance of every specific technology for the program in question.

However, those with a very broad background bring unique skills to the table that can't be solved with technical stack perfection. Being the sole troubleshooter of a broken legacy application written in an ancient coding language you've never studied is a skill that has to be earned in the field, not studied for.

There's a place for everyone at the table, and diversity is what gives it strength.

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