Starting something new is very unique. It is having the opportunity to explore, imagine, and experiment all at the same time. It’s really the unique perspective you come into something with—if you think about somebody new who’s either joining your organization, joining your team, fresh out of college, or coming from somewhere else, there’s really this fresh perspective that they bring. Knowing that they’re going to see things and interpret things that you make assumptions about today is something you only can have for a limited time.
For personal gain and growth, this is the best time to explore, see things, and try something new—because that’s where innovation happens. A lot of change that can happen early on starts with just a path that you go down that somebody else doesn’t, and being able to keep that perspective of growth and change over time is such a unique skill. It’s the ability to see things and try things that other people don’t necessarily expect. You may end up going down a path that is a little longer than others but end up at the same place—and that’s what makes it such a special trip.
If you learn a concept ahead of time, you may not understand the whole nuances of that concept. You’ll come back to it in six months and it means a whole lot different to you.
The Two Parallels of Beginning
Starting something new almost has two parallels. One is the idea of pushing a boulder up a hill—in the sense that it’s often the hardest to push that boulder up at the beginning, when you don’t have as much momentum. At the same time, you almost have to take on a contrary image, but it works very similarly: pushing a boulder down a hill. Very often, you don’t have the momentum to be able to continue something, and many people do not continue new things because they don’t gain enough momentum. They don’t see enough progress and payout.
Especially in today’s day and age, with so many new skills, technologies, and strategies to handle things, you really have to continue to evolve yourself and work towards that growth. If you make change and growth part of you, when these new challenges come up, they’re not as disruptive—your mindset is already in that changing mentality.
Acceptance and Making Ideas Your Own
One of the things I think is important with this rapid change is this idea of almost paralyzing the idea of… radical. The book Radical Candor is radical acceptance. These ideas that you have an experience—if you’re able to internalize them and accept them for what they are, you can take that knowledge and build and grow on it. So if somebody says something to you and you’re like, “Yeah, that makes a lot of sense,” then you can start applying that idea in your head, letting it soak around and making it something your own.
Steve Jobs was really famous for this. Somebody would give him an idea that’s contrary to what he thought, and then the next day he’d come in and make it sound like it was his. He randomly accepted the idea and made it into his own strategy.
So one thing you really have to do when you’re starting something new is let what your goals are with that evolve over time. You can have an initial idea—it doesn’t have to be perfect—and as you grow and experience more things, what you want to do with that grows, and then you make it your own. For example, if you want to start a project with something or learn something new, you may take a couple steps forward and then, “Oh, here’s this other thing that I can explore.” And that’s perfectly fine. All those experiences add up. But it’s really the act of starting it and making those initial days and times valuable that turns this new thing into something beneficial.
The Compound Effect of Practice
I’ve been working with AI myself, and the more I use it, the better I get. That’s one thing I really try to encourage people when they’re experiencing it for the first time: you have to regularly use it. Using it day in and day out, you figure out what works, what doesn’t work, how you should phrase things, what it’s good for, what it’s not good for. All these things tend to add up over time, and you figure out new strategies here and there. If you’re figuring out one new thing every week, you’re eventually going to get to the point where you’re doing a lot more strategies and thinking about things differently than everybody else—and you end up with some really impressive results.
But most people aren’t willing to see things more than two or three days and think they’ve got some magic strategy, some magic tool to solve that problem. The very frank matter is that when you’re starting something new, there is no such thing as a magic tool—unless it’s been hardened and refined over time by somebody else. But you’ve got to learn how to use that yourself. Otherwise, it’s not going to be valuable for you.
And that’s, at the end of the day, really the most important thing.
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