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No True Beginner
You are the #1 authority of your life.
Aaron Labajo
November 10, 2023
This was originally part of last week’s newsletter, but it got too big.
So I started taking my own advice and split it up.
The Silly Little Freshman
It was my first year of college as an aerospace engineering major.
With a fresh stack of resumes that listed all zero of my engineering experience, I treaded into my first career fair.
My first target was the Boeing line.
I meekly handed the recruiter my resume. His name was Clark. I straight up said, “I’m a first year, you’re probably not gonna see much.”
Great job of selling myself, right?
“Well Aaron, let’s take a look at your resume. You were a cook at a baseball stadium? So that means you know how to follow a process. Saw a few hundred customers a night? So you can work well under pressure. Leadership in high school? That tells me you’re good at managing other people. Which means you’re good at managing yourself.”
And he continued to go down my useless resume, but I got the point.
Last newsletter, I basically said you had nothing to offer as a beginner. I wasn’t lying, but I left something out.
Your skills are zero, but you have something to offer no one can take from you:
A lifetime of experiences.
“A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way. But, intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.”
A Tale of Two Masters
More than a CEO
Growing up in Sunnyvale, CA in the 60s, Bill Fernandez’s childhood home was riddled with Japanese minimalist art.
But there was no one more thrilled about it than his childhood best friend. He was obsessed.
This grew into a deep love for Japanese culture and art. One of his idols was Akio Morita, co-founder and CEO of Sony. He’d make regular visits to Japan to tour their factories and experience the culture.
Ultimately, it gave him a deep appreciation for the Japanese minimalist ideas of simplicity. One day, when the childhood friend started a company, it would be the foundation for all the excellent products it created.
A great CEO (eventually). A brilliant business mind. But he brought with him all the other experiences he had in his life.
“I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics,” he said. “Then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that’s what I wanted to do.”
Oh yeah, that childhood friend was Steve Jobs by the way. Say thank you to Bill Fernandez’s mom.
“Our house was the catalyst of Steve’s development of his aesthetic sense.”
Illegitimately Legitimate
Leonardo da Vinci was born out of wedlock.
At the time, this meant no university. No meaningful jobs. He was a loner.
And it was the best thing that happened to him.
He spent his childhood wandering the Vinci olive groves, walking through paths that took him through dense forests, flower fields, rivers, and diverse wildlife. It instilled a sense of awe and wonder from a young age.
Most importantly, he learned to observe the deeper intricacies of the world.
One day, he decided to put obsession onto paper.
So he stole some (not a joke, he was quite the rebel). And started sketching.
Over several years, he learned to draw in great detail the fauna and wildlife that surrounded him.
A unique blend of his circumstances, interests, and experiences came together as the foundation for his ventures in not just art, but engineering, chemistry, and science.
Being outside of the system worked to his advantage, as he had no need to be beholden to anything or anyone except the pursuit of understanding.
“Seen from this vantage point, everything in his life made sense. It was in fact a blessing to have been born illegitimate—it allowed him to develop in his own way. Even the paper in his house seemed to indicate some kind of destiny.”
Among Us
The great masters aren’t lizard people, except maybe Mark Zuckerberg.
We have the same brain, the same four limbs, the same two kidneys, and the same body.
The only difference is they channeled their experiences into what they love, and kept at it for longer than anyone else. And each experience created the next, and the next.
You can’t really pinpoint a specific “beginning”. Which means:
There are no true beginners.
You spent your entire life preparing for this moment, just as I did before writing this newsletter.
Every lesson, every skill, every reflection culminates into the present you know.
And you can use it to bring out the future you truly desire.
The True Beginning
So when did you begin?
The moment you were born.
Steve Jobs didn’t come out of the womb knowing he wanted to start a company. Leonardo da Vinci wasn’t “born” to make a giant horse.
Yet none of their contributions came from nothing.
None of it would have been possible without their experiences.
None of them had their future laid out for them.
But by living their lives the way they saw fit, refusing to cave to the standards society placed on them, they gathered meaningful experiences and combined them with valuable skills.
The biggest misconception is your skills exist in a vacuum. They’re part of something greater.
Your experiences and your skills come together to form your creativity.
“Einstein’s discovery of special relativity involved an intuition based on a decade of intellectual as well as personal experiences.”
Connecting the Dots
“…you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”
So which of your experiences will be valuable?
Well…you can’t know since you’re basically asking to predict the future. But if I could give a answer:
Eventually, everything.
You’re going to need faith.
“None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life.
But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography.
If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.”
Many times all you can do is trust that it’ll work itself out.
You can only look back on your life and see how everything has come together.
So look back.
Consider the things that you’ve done or accomplished in your life, even if it’s doing nothing but playing video games.
What have you learned from playing video games?
Seek to understand how those have shaped the decisions you make, and the skills you’ve picked up.
Every single moment can be a learning experience if you choose to listen.
And it will help you in the future if you trust it will.
Your North Star
You can’t predict the future, but you can steer the ship.
Follow your inner voice, your intuition, or whatever you want to call it.
Marie Kondo has helped millions organize their messy lives. But her philosophy doesn’t just apply to cleaning, it’s also useful for life.
In everything you do or consume, ask yourself:
“Does this spark joy?”
In my own words:
If it gives you goosebumps, follow it to the ends of the earth.
That is what it means to follow your inner voice.
If something brings you to tears, or an idea or thought so compelling crosses your mind that you have to write it down, that’s a dot.
Connect it.
And as you gather and connect more dots, you may look back one day and see a bigger picture start to form.
Follow your North Star.
“Each page had numbered dots that seemed random, but when you drew a line between the dots, a picture emerged that suddenly made sense. Voila! It’s a cat! It's a car!”
Conclusion
There are no true beginners.
To every new endeavor you bring a lifetime of experiences.
Everything you’ve learned can be channeled.
You didn’t know it at the time, but you have been preparing for this moment since the day you were born.
You are the sum of everything you’ve experienced.
All the pain, all the lessons, all moments, you bring all of that to the table.
As a beginner, you have nothing to offer.
But you have everything.
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