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EMEA Entrepreneurs

How do I become a writer/coder/creator/entrepreneur/x?

People often ask me how to become a writer, coder, or entrepreneur. I never really know how to answer this question. I’ve read a bunch of advice and guides and most of it seems approximately useless (unless you want to reverse engineer it and make a million dollars by selling courses in how to become those things, which seems like a popular thing for people to do).

Any advice in this area suffers heavily from survivorship bias. If you go ask successful people how they made it they’ll say things like ‘I woke up early and kept a todo list’ and you’ll think that if you do that you’ll also be successful because you don’t see all the people who are doing that and aren’t successful.

That said, I do see a few broad patterns that separate the ‘wannabe’ people from the ‘made it’ people that I know. Whether they’re entrepreneurs, employees, or made good progress towards whatever life goals they had, the people who I admire and respect tend to

  • Have a lot of self motivation. They find something and stick with it for years or decades.
  • Have a lot of skill. They didn’t just bash their head against a wall for 10 years, they first spend years or decades ‘grinding’ at some niche set of expertise
  • Are very curious. They’re always asking questions and figuring out how stuff works.
  • Are confident but humble. They’re happy to admit their own weaknesses, and say when they don’t understand something.

The people who are always trying but never making much progress tend to

  • Lack self motivation. They want to achieve some goal but they don’t want to consistently put in effort to reach it.
  • Lack skill. They are always looking for an easy win or shortcut or ‘just comment on this LinkedIn post for my 5-minute get-rich-quick guide’
  • Lack curiosity. They either dismiss new ideas, or uncritically chase every new fad without bothering to find out what it is or how it works.
  • Either have no self-confidence (I’m not the kind of person who can just do things) or are very arrogant (I’m the best at everything and the only reason I haven’t done anything is because <reasons>).

I don’t really know if that’s a scientific distinction or just anecdotal, and even if it were a real distinction it is very hard to separate correlation and causation. It’s also hard to ‘become’ those things in the first section while avoiding the ones in the second, so it’s arguably not very useful.

But here are some concrete steps that I think anyone can use to get started at ‘becoming’ something

How to be anything

  • Understand the basics of the ‘growth mindset’ concept. It’s become a very bullshit-filled space, dominated by HR thought leaders, but the core concept is valuable. There are some things that you ‘are’ and can’t change (tall/short, old/young), and some things that you ‘are’ and can change (rich/poor, introverted/extroverted, technical/not-technical). A common mistake is to make the negative things that you can change part of your identity and then constantly tell yourself ‘oh I can’t get to this outcome that I want because I’m not <thing that can be changed>‘.
  • Understand the basics of self motivation, being in the ‘zone’ or ‘flow state’. Another very over-hyped and over-commercialized concept, but again the basics are real. If you’re working on a problem that’s not too easy (so you’re not bored) and not too difficult (so you’re not too anxious), where you care about the result, and you have some freedom to choose the direction, then you can work for hours at a time without it feeling like a chore. You gain energy from this process instead of it feeling draining or exhausting.
  • Set some short-term and long-term goals. In the next week/month/year/decade I want to <>
  • Keep a regular and detailed journal about the progress you’ve made, the things that are working well and the things that aren’t working at all. The best example I’ve seen of this are Cory Zue’s retrospectives. Here’s one example of an early one. He set goals every month for years, grading himself on each goal and learning how to build, market, and sell himself into being a successful Indiehacker who now makes enough money from his own projects that he’s no longer comfortable sharing all the details. You don’t have to do it in public. While I was building Ritza, I sent monthly retrospectives in a similar format to an email list of 4-5 people instead. But it’s easy to lie to yourself about progress and it’s very useful to write it down, both from what you learn during the actual writing process, and to read back on later and figure out what’s next.

You can just do things

There’s a famous and maybe true story about someone asking Mozart how to write a symphony

Mozart: “You’re too young to write a Symphony. You must start with a Sonata”

Person: “But, but you were writing symphonies when you were five”

Mozart: “Yes, but I wasn’t going around asking people how”.

Some amount of disrespect for authority or systems is definitely useful if you want to become something that you’re not. I don’t think it’s essential, but if your first instinct is to do instead of to ask for permission to do, you’ll probably have a head start.

I started ‘coding’ before I knew what programming was. My dad asked for some help with cashing up in his doctor’s practice and I saw what a tedious task it was to create a new Excel sheet, add the same categories and columns, put in the numbers, save it, and print it out. We didn’t have a lot of PC games, so I’d spent some time clicking random stuff in Excel to see what it did, and found the ‘record macro’ button. I found the ‘edit macro’ button and figured out I could copy and paste bits of the weird looking text I saw (which I later learned was VBA) to make the computer do things at the push of a button. I built what was probably both one of the worst bits of software of all time (thousands of lines of spaghetti code and writing temporary strings all over random spreadsheet cells) and the most long-lasting (I think he and his receptionist used it for about a decade afterwards).

When I did a real coding course as part of my bachelor’s degree, I was also studying German. It was before Duolingo, and I wanted some software to help me learn vocab. I was tired of the system of putting words in a list or in a matchbox because I spent a lot of time studying words I knew, and not enough time studying the ones that I didn’t. Now that I knew what for loops and if statements were (I was a nerd and actually went to classes unlike many of my peers at the time) I put together another monstrosity of a command line application that had four nested loops to prioritize a list of English words that I wanted to learn the German equivalents for, based on when I’d last been quizzed on them and when I’d last gotten them correct. I then had to learn about character encoding because I had a Windows laptop and it put question marks in the command line instead of the special German characters, so I spent a week learning about Unicode.

I guess my point is that the best way to learn is to

  • Find a problem that you care about. I see a lot of people building a portfolio site or a Trello clone or something that they think might impress someone out there, but generally doesn’t. Forget about other people. Find a problem that you have, and figure out how you can solve that (preferably in a way that overlaps with whatever you’re trying to become).
  • Pick something that’s neither too easy nor too ambitious. (See the bit about flow state above). The goal is that you’re going to get something that will be satisfying and inspire you to take the next step, but also that will lead to a journey of discovery - to help you find the ‘unknown unknowns’ in your life and replace them with ‘known knowns’ (or at least ‘known unknowns’.)

Specific resources

I don’t think it matters too much what resources you use. There are a lot out there. Some people spend their lives starting new books or courses because the one they have isn’t working out for them. Rather pick one and stick with it for as long as you can.

Don’t get too stuck in the reading. You can’t learn to create by consuming, only by creating.