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I love learning something new.
New skill, new hobby, new book, new tech– let me at ‘em. This voracious curiosity is probably why I’m a serial generalist… and perhaps why I’m an investor. Back when I was in public markets, I used to say that “Investing is the greatest job in the world. I get paid to learn.” Now that I’m in venture the privilege is one better, but the point still stands.
One of the beautiful things about climbing any skill tree is getting a taste for just how incredibly masterful the people in the highest branches are.
This week’s slice of humble pie has come from vibe coding. Replit released V3 of their Agent, and I felt that it would negligent for the technologist in me not to give it a whirl. I’ve previously vibe coded a project or two, so I was excited to see how much better the tech had gotten. I thought I’d start with something dumb to keep it very simple.
The problem: my buddy runs an annual pick ‘em league every NFL season, and he organizes this fun little tradition through the world’s jankiest app:
I figured that one upping this Windows 94-looking app would be an easy side project.
I’ll spare you the gory details on the logistics of the league (and how I got labeled ‘Lil Gup’ 🐟), but suffice to say that it’s a relatively simple idea: populate some weekly games, pull some Vegas spreads, add some snappy point calculations. Let the shit talking commence.
The only problem is, I am utterly untechnical. The extent of my coding expertise is limited to MySpace html in middle school, and yelling at Replit over and over to brute force a GPT-wrapper that would teach me rhetoric…
So, of course, I started prompting gibberish and crafting the skeleton of a crappy MVP:
Duking it out with Replit half the weekend to bring my little vision to life reminded of a classic Ira Glass clip:
“Nobody tells people who are beginners… All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. Do you know what I mean?
You want to make TV because you love TV. There’s stuff that you just love. Ok.
So you’ve got really good taste, and you get into this thing that- and I don’t know how to describe it, but it’s like there’s a gap. That for the first couple years that you’re making stuff… what you’re making isn’t so good. Ok? It’s not that great. It’s really not that great.
It’s trying to be good. It has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good.
But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, your taste is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. You know what I mean? Like, you can tell that it’s still kind of crappy.
A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people at that point, they quit.
And the thing that I would just like say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work- they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste, they could tell that what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be, they knew it fell short… it didn’t have the special thing that we wanted it to have.
The thing that I would say to you is that everybody goes through that. And for you to go through it, if you’re going through it right now, if you’re just getting out of that phase- or if you’re just starting off and you’re entering into that phase, you gotta know it’s totally normal and the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work.
Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month, you know you’re going to finish one story, you know what I mean? Whatever it’s going to be, but you create the deadline. It’s best if you have somebody who’s waiting for work from you, somebody who’s expecting work from you. Even if it’s not somebody who pays you, but that you’re in a situation where you have to turn out the work.
It’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you’re actually going to catch up and close that gap, and the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.” - Ira Glass on Storytelling
One of my favorite videos on skill from a legendary creator. It’s a resounding endorsement for the volume required to be great.
This is one of my favorite truisms that I’m constantly relearning. I’m an ambitious optimist with a penchant for trying whatever I’m really into lately, so I get my fair share of reminders. This week is some software development, historically that’s been music (playing, producing, DJing). I think there are parallels in both of these fields that really prove the point.
At the highest levels, both software development and music production are manifestations of creative taste, forged through thousands of hours of practice. Done well, the outputs of both belie their complexity. Beautiful apps and bangin’ tracks both appear deceptively polished and devilishly simple.
Calvin Harris is a great example of this from the world of dance music. I’m not even his biggest fan, but I have an immense respect for the sheen of his mega hits. The man can brew a banger. He’s mastered the formula of surfacing once every few years, finding the hottest female pop star of the hour, tossing her vocals over a dance beat, and minting a certified heater:
Outside (ft. Ellie Goulding), 2014 - 1.6B streams
This is What We Came For (ft. Rihanna), 2016 - 2.1B streams
One Kiss (ft. Dua Lipa), 2018 - 2.5B streams
All three of these tracks are commercially immaculate. The cadence, the sparkle, the sex appeal of each combined to produce a certified summer hit, year after year. The tracks seem so simple- formulaic, even.. Like modern art, you think to yourself “Hell, I could do that.”
Then you download Ableton.
The hours that went into producing those perfect three and a half minute bops are mind boggling. Between recording, mixing, mastering, and all that jazz, the devil hides deep in the details of what it takes to make a track sing. The arc of accessibility bends toward bringing down the underlying costs and simplifying some of the inputs, but the hours to polish a craft still remain.
We hear this level of excellence so frequently that it’s easy to forget how amazing it really is.
The actual playing of an instrument is no different. When I was last taking saxophone lessons, I remember thinking just how skilled almost every musician you see is. Even the guys in the jam band playing that dive bar on Rainey are so far beyond what modicum of skill I gathered playing for 5 years. Every DJ on every label, big and small, has put countless hours into their craft.
Software is much the same. Amazing software is forgettable. It’s sleek, it’s intuitive. It’s so natural as to be second nature. It’s the little bubble rubber banding on your iphone, so subtly satisfying.
I try to vibe code half a skeleton of a quarter of an app…
…and immediately realize I don’t understand UX/UI, data bases, APIs, authorizations and any of the other million little things that go into making crisp software. Once you start putting your money where your mouth is, you have quite a bit more empathy when X, an app running millions of actions per minute (second?) at a global scale, is down for 5 minutes.
We’re so used to everything being amazing that we’re aghast by the slightest inconveniences in experiences that are otherwise so profound as to be magical:
But that’s really the joy of being an amateur. You can once again be intimidated by the gulf between your ideas and the execution required to breathe life into them. The volume Ira mentions reminds me simply of the reps required to achieve proficiency. You look at the gear of any new hobby, from the hooks and baubles of a master fisherman to the knobs and sliders of a maestro producer, and you appreciate the elemental mastery a virtuoso commands.
Sometimes this chasm can be offputting. It’s endlessly frustrating to willingly throw yourself into the gap between your taste and your abilities. It’s demoralizing to see the road ahead. “If only I’d begun years ago..”, you might say to yourself.
As with anything worth chasing, the best time to plant a seed was 30 years ago, the second best time is now.
So, I implore you to do something hard. There is so much joy in learning something new, and we’re so fortunate to benefit from those who chase their obsessions.
- 🍋