You Will Never Truly Grow Until You Go Through This - The Techtonic

 

I have a friend who recently decided to dive into the world of AI to kickstart their own creative journey. In the beginning, I was genuinely thrilled for them. I eagerly shared everything I knew, acting as a guide. But as time went on, I noticed a distinct shift.

At first, they had a fierce willingness to learn, relentlessly asking questions with incredible passion. But once they got a baseline understanding of AI, that passion transformed. Instead of pushing deeper, they started looking for shortcuts. Maximum results, minimum effort. The moment I felt that shift toward chasing easy wins, I stopped sharing my insights.

A few days later, we sat down to talk. My friend insisted they weren't looking for a free ride. The real problem was anxiety. Because they had started later than everyone else, they were plagued by a suffocating fear of falling behind. To catch up, they felt they had to know everything instantly. Chasing the latest trends felt mandatory, and only the most hyper-efficient paths seemed acceptable. That anxiety was what looked like laziness from the outside.

Hearing that made me realize I needed to write about this. I completely understand why my friend felt that way. But the reality of human growth is brutal. To truly evolve, you have to go through the messy process of failure. And most people in modern society do everything they can to skip exactly that stage.

The Neuroscience of Feeling Stupid

Whenever you try to learn something entirely new, you are guaranteed to feel foolish, confused, and utterly lost. You might not even understand what you are doing. But from a neuroscientific perspective, this discomfort is not only normal. It is mandatory.

Learning something new is the literal act of building new neural pathways. When you are drowning in confusion, your brain is actively laying down new synapses between neurons. Flip that logic around and you get a profound truth: if you do not feel stupid, and if you are not confused, it means no new knowledge is entering your brain. This is exactly why, as I wrote in Why Learning How to Learn Is the Only Meta Skill You Need in the AI Era, mastering the friction of learning is your greatest advantage.

To grow, you have to give your brain the time it needs to pave these internal highways. If you endure the discomfort, a moment will inevitably come when the patterns become familiar and clarity strikes.

Before I started this blog, I was a completely ordinary engineer. But I had a burning desire to break into marketing and business. I launched my own social media channels, which eventually led me to realize I needed to build and sell my own products.

The chaotic moment of creating your first product alone

My very first product was an e-book, and I used Canva to design the sales page. Creating that first page was an exercise in pure chaos. Every single step felt confusing, and I honestly had no idea what I was doing. In hindsight, I probably should have hired a professional. But because I insisted on doing everything myself, the entire project turned into a massive, disorganized mess.

Yet as I stumbled through that confusion, trying one random thing after another, something clicked. A sudden intuition hit me. Ah, this is how it's done. My brain had finally completed the highway.

Right now, I am building a web service. Coding individual features was relatively straightforward. But as the number of features grew and they began interacting with one another, the complexity exploded. Once again, I found myself completely overwhelmed, wondering what on earth I was doing.

This time, though, my perspective was different. I knew this exact feeling was my brain struggling to comprehend the overarching architecture of the program. It was laying down roads to recognize the broader pattern. By shifting my mindset that way, the pain and confusion actually became enjoyable.

True learning is nothing more than a continuous cycle of this process. The beginning is always chaotic, and you will always feel foolish. But that discomfort is the ultimate proof that your brain is hard at work.

The Illusion of the Easy Shortcut

There is another massive reason why people today, much like my friend, recoil from the true learning process. Social media.

Social media feeds flooded with misleading promises of effortless wealth

Everywhere we look, we are bombarded with headlines screaming that anyone can make a fortune by following a few brainless steps. Because these messages are so ubiquitous, people have genuinely begun to believe that effortless success is real.

The profound irony is that the true titans of industry, people like Jensen Huang and Charlie Munger, preach the exact opposite. They constantly tell us to pursue things that only we can uniquely do, rather than chasing what everyone else is doing.

They openly say that building a business involves staggering amounts of pain and an overwhelming number of unpredictable variables. They warn us that even if your product is completely differentiated, and even if you outwork everyone else, there is still no guarantee of success. This is exactly why they advise against chasing things just because they make money, a reality I broke down in Why Chasing Money Is the Worst Business Strategy in the AI Era. Pursue what you find genuinely valuable instead. And I am convinced that is the absolute truth.

True learning and real growth will always make you feel confused and foolish. Entering uncharted territory is terrifying, and the fear of failure can be paralyzing. I know that firsthand.

But as my friend's journey shows, looking for shortcuts because others make it look easy, obsessing over the fastest route, or refusing to take new risks out of fear are guaranteed ways to ensure you never succeed. You have to embrace the confusion. Because the breakthrough you are looking for lives on the other side of it.

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