<i>But until then, you’re in a magical position to make great strides. To propose radical solutions, deliberately ignorant ideas that just might be brilliant.</i><p>A more general opportunity is the opportunity to document misconceptions. I'm in the process of learning Clojure, and it's the little misconceptions that hang you up. But just a little change in perspective in how you see things can totally unstuck you.<p>Documenting those little changes in perspective, those little ah-ha moments, could really help future travelers.<p>I've been recording them as much as possible, noting the "the one thing/sentence that I could have told my future self that would have helped me understand it" (<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3998679" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3998679</a>). Being able to view a collection of everyone's would be enlightening.
You may only get one chance to be a beginner, but you can cultivate "Beginners Mind" or "Shoshin" (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshin" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshin</a>)<p>Edit: "Saadat A. Khan suggests that "Beginner's mind embodies the highest emotional qualities such as enthusiasm, creativity, zeal, and optimism. If the reader reflects briefly on the opposites of these qualities, it is clear to see that quality of life requires living with beginner's mind. With beginner's mind, there is boundlessness, limitlessness, an infinite wealth."
Reminds me of Neil Gaiman's recent commencement speech at the University of the Arts. I definitely recommend checking it out if this little tidbit of advice from 37signals was inspiring at all.<p>EDIT: forgot to link to the speech: <a href="https://vimeo.com/42372767" rel="nofollow">https://vimeo.com/42372767</a>
<i>... you have the clarity to make things drastically better. You won’t miss the non-sense the veterans have long since accepted as the norm. Once you’ve acclimated to the temperature of the pot, you’ll get boiled alongside all the other frogs.</i><p>The message of this one paragraph is kind of ok but the rest and in particular DHH's choice of words is as usual awkward and feels like flatulent talk from a self-help book—too many adjectives and over-zealously constructed metaphors.<p>What he is talking about is not about being a beginner or that you only get one chance to be a beginner, it's just about <i>change</i>:<p>- That you face change all the time<p>- That you should always be prepared for change<p>- And that you should actively seek for change the entire time and see change as something beneficial<p>Thus, you get a chance to be a beginner more than once with every change.
>You won’t miss the non-sense the <i>veterans have long since accepted as the norm.</i><p>I couldn't help but think "Isn't this one of those things veterans accept as the norm? That you can only do this once, and, after that, your view is tainted forever?"<p>I refuse to accept this.
It is true that you can make quick progress as a beginner but there are other areas where is can be painfully slow. Launching a new product while dealing with the growing pains of a new business can cause a lot of wasted time. Having someone with more experience around can be invaluable to a new start up, especially if you are doing something other than software where the start up costs are prohibitively high (tooling, patents etc)