You Still Have to Ride the Bike [Raw Session]

00:00 — You Still Have to Ride the Bike

Hey welcome back to Slow Builds.

This is a video I was pretty excited about when I came up with the idea. It came out of a bad situation, but the idea itself seemed pretty solid to me.

And what the idea is, is you can’t learn everything from a book.

There are things in life you only learn by doing them. There are things in life like riding a bike, driving a car, in my case building software, managing money is a big one, raising kids — oh my goodness. You can read all the books you want, but that hits your heart.

Handling conflict, you can have all the tools from reading and listening to podcasts or whatever, but until you’re in it and you deal with your own emotions, it’s always gonna feel real in the moment.

And that goes with family situations, where I kinda came out of this one, me thinking about this idea.

And just starting something new in general. Like you can read the books and get all the ideas through your head and how to, like building something, like physical. At some point you actually gotta do the thing.

Doesn’t mean you should ignore everything that can be learned before you start.

You still have to ride the bike, but you do not need to start with no tires on the bike.

01:28 — Reading Does Not Replace Experience

So, this whole video is not about just read and you’ll know everything.

Obviously, you still gotta put the knowledge to use.

Because just reading, you can read about balance, but it doesn’t teach your body how to balance.

So, like you can read all you want about the slack rope, I think it was, a slack walk or whatever. I tried that with my kids and I did all the YouTube videos, did all the reading, and we bought it, we put it up there.

And yeah, it didn’t matter what I read.

We weren’t doing it.

And same with money, you can learn everything you want about investing and follow the greats and have the best intentions.

But it’s not easy.

There’s a lot of emotion involved and you don’t know what the market’s gonna do at any moment.

And like I said, parenting, like there’s a million books.

And I remember one day, the first time they said, “Can you go home now?”

And I was like, “What do you mean? Are you coming with me?”

Because you’re on your own.

So you’re in the deep end.

And same, like I said, conflict. There’s an emotional part, so it’s hard to sometimes go back and remember all those things, that you get to be calm, take a breath, take a step back.

Because when things are coming at you fast and your heart rate goes up and you’re sweating and you’re feeling attacked or you’re feeling overwhelmed, it’s hard to keep what you read in front of your mind.

There’s always a gap between knowing something intellectually and living it.

Some lessons have to move from your head into your body and that only happens through experience.

03:26 — Experience Can Be Expensive

But experience can be expensive.

Experience matters, but learning everything through it is extremely costly.

You pay with time, money a lot of times, extreme stress.

You can lose relationships, strain them.

Legal issues could happen, health, sleep, just the overall emotional capacity.

Some of those lessons are worth learning directly, but some lessons have already been paid for by other people.

Books, history, biographies, news, court cases, business failures, family stories, financial mistakes, addiction. There’s a lot of stories out there and a lot of real life examples to learn from with health.

These are all lessons sitting there in front of you, whether they’re through a book, a podcast, a movie, any way you can get your hands on it.

Experience is a very good teacher, but it’s not always the cheap, it’s not always a cheaper teacher.

04:32 — The Bike Analogy

And this goes back to the bike analogy.

You still have to get on the bike.

You still have to wobble.

You still have to learn how to balance.

You still have to pedal, turn, brake, fall a little.

We all fall.

Everyone fell.

There’s a reason why there’s training wheels.

You do have to adjust and you got to get back on the bike.

But before you start, you can check some obvious things.

You can make sure the chain is on there and it has the right amount of oil on it and it’s lubed up and not rusty.

You can make sure there’s tires on it and those tires are not flat.

You can make sure there’s brakes and they work.

You can, are you starting from the wrong gear?

Make sure you’re in a gear that allows you to start the bike easier.

Maybe there’s no gears, which is probably better to start with.

Are you trying to learn on a hill and are you going up or down?

Or it’s probably better to be on a flat surface.

And those things do not remove the learning process.

They make the learning safer and less wasteful.

Preparation does not ride the bike for you.

It just gives you a better bike to learn on.

05:41 — Why History Matters

And this is why history matters.

Move from the bike to life.

And history does not repeat perfectly, but human patterns repeat pretty consistently.

Denial, delay, overconfidence, avoidance, bad intentions, debt, addiction, family conflict, legal issues, bad documentation, missed deadlines, procrastination, ignoring obvious warnings, just being oblivious to what’s happening and not taking it in.

Maybe you don’t see those warnings because you haven’t read enough or studied enough of what those warnings would entail and where they’d come from.

And the names change, the technology changes, the specific situations change, but the shape of those situations and the shape of the things and the moments are pretty familiar.

And most things have already happened, some form of it, in the past.

History does not give you a script, but it can show you the shape of the room before you walk into it.

06:58 — Learning From Others Is Not Cowardly

And learning from others is not being cowardly.

It’s not hitting it front and on and doing it yourself.

And this is where the challenge, this is the way AI tells me, this is where you challenge the idea that real learning only comes from suffering through things yourself.

And this is a strange pride people sometimes have in learning the hard way.

But not every hard lesson makes you wiser.

Sometimes it makes you tired.

It leaves you very damaged, whether health, physical, has a toll on your body and mental.

Sometimes it has a very realistic cost, money-wise, financially.

Sometimes the lesson was obvious from the beginning, if you had looked around and you would have already avoided a lot of the pitfalls.

So learning from someone else’s mistakes is not avoiding life.

It is respecting the costs that are already paid.

08:04 — The Developer Example

And before I go a little deeper on that, before I jump to the next one, I’m gonna talk about that one.

Because I remember as a developer going through university and we learned how code worked.

We learned how computers worked.

And so when I got out and started coding in the real world, like for a job and work, I always felt you had to build it yourself.

Because like, but the work I do now, there’s a lot of gems and libraries and different things like that.

So people have already built these things.

And my take was you had to build it yourself.

You’re not a real coder, you’re not a real developer, unless you built yourself from scratch.

Don’t take the shortcut.

That’s a lot of time.

There’s a lot of lessons that I have to learn that have already been learned, a lot of like error handling.

The biggest one in my account I always think about is like time, and the times involved.

What time zone are you in?

What daylight savings comes into effect?

What currency are you in?

What metric system are you using?

And just all these different things.

So like, I’ve learned over the years that as long as you use the right libraries, the right gems, the trusted ones that have gone through those years of people adding to it and doing it, why would I waste my time doing it?

I can’t do it better.

If I do use it, I’m better off finding the mistake and adding to it so other people learn also.

I can be part of that history of passing on lessons learned.

And so I really believe taking the lessons learned saves so much time, headache, and there’s no cowardliness in it anymore.

There’s no manly — I don’t want to say the word manliness, but macho.

It’s OK to accept help from others.

It’s okay to learn from others.

There’s a reason why people wrote about it or tell their story so other people don’t go through the same mistakes.

10:21 — Seeing Patterns Before Others Are Ready

And this is where I’m gonna bring in the family personal part carefully.

Okay, just tell me to be careful.

When you read a lot and recognize patterns, you can sometimes jump quickly to the likely outcome.

And this is where this video came from.

In the situation that this came out of, I could see what was happening.

I could see the situation.

I could see all the facts were laid out in front of me.

And I matched them against things I’ve read, I’ve seen, I’ve lived through, I’ve experienced myself.

And I think that this is where outcomes.

So I already know what the possible outcomes are going to be and what process we have to go through for each of those outcomes, from the best outcome to the middle ground to the worst.

My mind is always going to prepare for the worst and hope for the best.

But to someone else it sounds cold because I instantly go, this is where this is probably going to go, we need to prepare now.

While everyone else is going through and analyzing what’s currently happening in front of their eyes, they’re only processing the moment.

They’re not looking ahead based off experience — not experience, knowledge.

Knowledge that they gain from reading, from researching, from watching, just learning and taking that and applying it to the current situation and quickly evaluating and coming to the final, the three possible final outcomes.

You pick the worst outcome because if you’re prepared for the worst, then you’re miles ahead for the best and you’re already covered for the middle.

So my mind instantly says, “Okay, we need to do this, this and this.”

And it comes across very cold.

They look at me as like I’m not a nice person, I have no empathy, I don’t care.

Because they still need to process that.

They may need to talk through the whole thing.

They may feel like you skipped over the entire emotional part.

They may hear the preparation as judgment.

But what I’m doing is I’m trying to reduce the damage, but they might be hearing it as me not caring.

12:53 — Preparation Is Not Negativity

I would rather analyze it quickly, figure out what we need to do, prepare those things because they’re going to take time.

And if you wait, if you wait too long in hopes that the best outcome happens but the worst is what we get, then you’re too late.

Then it becomes a minefield of emotion, bad decisions, you know, thinking clearly.

I’d rather be prepared and then as it’s happening know that it’s prepared, have that stress out of my life so I could just absorb the situation, try to navigate it more towards the better outcome, knowing that if the worst happens, we’re already ready for it.

So it’s not cold.

It’s not caring.

It’s trying to mitigate the costs, the emotional cost, the financial cost, the heartache, just being prepared.

I like being prepared for things.

Preparing for a bad outcome does not mean you want the outcome.

See, I was going through all this in my head in section 15:30, preparation is not negativity.

My mind, maybe I did my 52 video and I talked about how I don’t like, I like having these written out and reading through them because I don’t want to miss the little nuggets, the little, all the things I want and right here it is.

Preparing for a bad outcome does not mean you want it.

Documenting something does not mean you’re escalating it.

Understanding the process does not mean you have already given up.

Saving emails, writing things down, checking timelines, finding forms, calling the right person, finding the right person, getting advice, knowing all the options.

That’s not panic.

That’s keeping the bike from falling apart while you’re trying to ride it.

Preparing for the worst is not the same as hoping for the worst.

And I really feel that preparing for the worst and having everything lined up and ready for all situations is me being more caring.

It’s taken that brunt of it so that as people, as things, those dominoes start falling, you’re there to catch.

You’ve already got those nets in place to make sure they don’t fall through the cracks or you lose anything along the way and it softens the blow a little bit in my mind.

I think there’s a lot of caring in that and it’s a heavy weight to carry, especially when I’m always told that I’m cold and I don’t care and I’m too abrupt about it.

15:57 — Using AI to Prepare

And now we have tools that can help surface the checklist faster.

And I’ve been using that, especially in this situation I’m talking about.

You can take the situation and ask ChatGPT.

I create notes, I create projects.

What documents do I need?

What deadlines matter?

What should be written down?

Who should be contacted?

What are the common mistakes that people mostly make?

What are the possible outcomes that can happen from here?

What should be prepared right now?

Give me a timeline.

And I say AI does not replace judgment, but it can compress the research stage of it.

Especially now, it can help me move quickly.

It can help me get all the forms, the documents, fill ’em out, get ’em in order, prep the emails, find me the contact information, for help, for anything.

AI does not make the decision for you, but it can help you see the checklist before things get too messy.

And it’s helped a lot.

It’s helped prep emails, help me remove the emotion and help formulate those emails better.

It helps me read messages that I’m looking at from an emotional point of view and putting my outlook and what I’m thinking, my perspective on it.

And it reads it from a different angle.

It reads it from exactly what it is and from what I’ve given it from the past.

And it sees those nuances and what reality really is and it helps level you.

And then it helps prepare, then it helps change the plan and the direction.

So it’s not me being cold.

It’s not me being emotional about it or just trying to get it over with.

It’s me trying to let something else plan the steps for me so I can take myself out of it.

And then we can focus on the real problem, emotional problems, their relationships, the other things that happen.

Obviously you can see this is more or less a family thing that happened and still going on and this is where this came from.

18:09 — The Balance I’m Trying to Find

So the balance I’m trying to find is you still believe in, I still believe in being very direct.

I still believe in reading.

I still believe in learning from history.

I still believe in preparing early.

But maybe the lesson is that people sometimes need to see how I get there.

Not a long debate about it, not endless emotional loops because it drains me.

But enough of the bridge that they understand the conclusion that I come to is not coming from arrogance or being cold or being indifferent.

Sometimes I’m not wrong about the pattern but I may be too fast with my conclusion and a lot of it off puts a lot of people sometimes.

18:52 — Not Certainty, Just a Better Chance

So you still have to ride that bike.

You still have to learn balance.

You still have to wobble.

You still have to live through some things.

But you can start with the chain on.

You can start with air in the tires.

You can start in the right gear.

You can pick better ground to start learning how to ride.

You can learn from people who already crashed.

That does not guarantee the outcome but it gives you a better chance.

And maybe that is all preparation really is.

Not certainty.

Just a better chance.

It’s a better chance to help you not waste emotion, waste time, finance, endless cycles, lose relationships.

It’s a way for you to stay level headed.

It’s also a validation to know that the work you put in of learning the tools you’re using, like using AI to help suffer through millions and millions of data in other people’s situations.

But again, I could skip the AI directly, but I still want to read the books.

I still want to absorb that myself.

I don’t want just AI to analyze it.

I guess that’s the way you look at it.

Like I can ask AI a question.

It’s gonna give me an answer right away.

Whereas I can also read a book about it.

And then I can take those lessons learned from the book and I can formulate the conclusion the same way AI did.

But it allows me to absorb the information, learn a little bit more, understand why that answer is there.

Or we can go down the road of no AI, no reading, no watching a video, and just living through it.

But the problem with living through it is you only get one chance at it.

And whatever outcome you get, the only way you get to do a different one is to go through that same situation again and try different things.

Whereas that becomes extremely costly, timely, stressful, in a bad situation.

And that’s where like reading the stories, reading the books and going, not just about one outcome and how one person got through something or what they did, many, multiple, seeing all the different sides of it, seeing, that’s where you get the best case to the worst case.

How you got there, what were the signs, what were the resolutions, and you learn how to apply that to your own life.

And then you pass that along.

And that’s sort of, again, that’s where my book was coming into play, was trying to pass those little things along, those little nuances and little things that I’ve come across.

And this is one of them.

You know, read, read, read and absorb it and take it in.

And don’t just read it as passive, but read it as trying to learn from it.

So you can take that knowledge into your own life.

So yeah, sometimes you just gotta get on the bike.

Thanks for watching, bye.