It struck me today that you can make your own luck simply by doing things earlier than most of the other people around you believe is reasonable. We’re in this strange world now where folks don’t need an engineering background to make pretty great software, but I decided to teach myself programming when folks in design were saying that you shouldn’t need to. I didn’t think that I needed to, I just... wanted to.

Now that we’re here, I assume things will do what they always do: just keep moving; shift over. The reason I’m teaching myself machine learning now is that it’s just the next most fun thing to me. It’s the thing that most folks in design won’t be doing, but that will increasingly be the thing that defines what software gets made, and how the world is shaped by it. I don’t want to just work with the output, I want to shape the thing itself.

The thing that you have to do, I think, is just assume that you can do it. Assume that you can do anything, really, because you probably can. If someone can do it, you can probably do it. Maybe you can even do it really well. I try to quiet the critical part of my brain and just start poking around, feeling incredibly dumb until I feel... a little less dumb. After all, don’t we all listen to the critical part of our brain too much already?