I believe one of the luckiest breaks a talented, ambitious person can have in life is failing at the beginning of their career. As an aspiring young entrepreneur, the first company that I tried and failed at was a chocolate company, I was 18.
From my naive perspective, it was a brilliant product. Everybody loves delicious chocolate and my partner was a retired expert in the field. As for me, I was passionate and driven enough to do all of the marketing and sales, my motivation was believing the entire world needed to know how good at baking my partner was. I still believe this today.
As a second-year student in college, I spent 5 months meeting with my entrepreneurship professor, researching business plans, meeting with local successful entrepreneurs, and learning everything I can about how to start a business. Ultimately, I gave up because it is really friggin expensive to gather the necessary resources to start making chocolate (a commercial kitchen, machinery, the raw ingredients, branding and packaging, storage, etc).
The lesson I learned from this venture was that before I could start a chocolate business, I’d need to find a business idea that didn't require money. I settled on making an app. Brilliant! All you need is a laptop and internet, right? The new problem was I had no idea how to code.
In order to start, I had to partner with a great coder or learn how to code myself. I decided to do both and see which would help first. Immediately, I started googling what it took to become a coder online. I started doing Harvard's Intro to Computer Science Online Class, signed up for my college's Intro class, and did as many tutorials as I could find in the interim.
The prospect of building a product I didn't understand was really intimidating, but the idea of not starting a business and giving up was not an option. I knew, like many other aspiring entrepreneurs, that if I could get all the stars aligned, I would be really good at running a business. I ultimately tried to partner with a couple of different students on various ideas that all failed, but I never stopped learning to code myself.
I knew that for as long as I was broke, making software would need to be my first business. And not wanting to be dependent on anybody for my success made it clear I needed to learn the skill myself.
Learning to code was as unnatural to me as a dog learning how to swim, but it has been one of the most fruitful endeavors of my life. Why? Because finally learning tore down the most sacred belief I had about myself: that I am not a coder.
The value we give our time, the things we call our strengths and weaknesses, what we believe we can and can't do, and our motivations, are all stories we make up in our head. They're just fictional boundaries that keep us in a routine. Truthfully, none of us have any idea what we are actually capable of.