One humid Sunday afternoon in Saigon I went to my teacher’s house. She said, “These days I stay neutral and calm — if something works, it works; if it doesn’t, I let it go.” The sentence sounded weightless back then, and only now do I grasp even a sliver of it.
When it comes to learning and growth, Tea keeps reminding herself — and anyone who needs to hear it — to be gentle. Study because you’re curious, not because you’ve perfect-ranked every topic. Starting is what counts.
When I first learned to code and automate tasks, people insisted, “You must master Python, HTML, CSS before you can do anything real.” Sure, those skills help. But how long does that syllabus take? What if you grind through a whole foundation course and burn out? No one forbids you from “doing” before fully “learning.” Pick a project you genuinely need, copy snippets if you must (just don’t resell them as-is), then tweak and iterate. Later, when you have time, circle back to the basics.
Language learning works the same way. We often hear “Fix your grammar and vocabulary before you speak.” Some classes spend months “fixing the foundation” before letting students talk. That might be one approach. But a faster — arguably more Cambridge-approved — path is to speak now, communicate now, and patch the rules later. We’ve all heard stories of people who became fluent by throwing themselves into conversations on the street every day.
People say, “Keep walking and you’ll arrive.” If fear stalls you at the start, when will you begin — and how will you ever get there? Move, learn whatever the journey demands, and adjust. When you don’t know, study. When you’re not skilled yet, practice. If today is a write-off, pick it up tomorrow. Accept your own “work in progress,” because each draft you ship tends to be better than the last.
Kids don’t follow the same sequence either. Some never crawl, they just pull themselves up and wobble into walking days later. Others spend weeks in a walker and then suddenly sprint the moment they’re put on the floor. Every pace is valid.
What you make today can become “legacy,” not “obsolete.” The Selenium scripts I wrote before Codex or Claude still sharpen how I think and solve problems. Stronger tools only amplify that foundation.
Today’s idea of perfect might crumble tomorrow, yet tomorrow it might be exactly what you need. The point isn’t how many textbook steps you ticked off; it’s that you start, keep moving, and refuse to be paralysed by imperfection. Keep going, keep making, and one day you’ll realise you’ve been heading forward all along.