Startup advice and the clarity of experience

I like Clayton Christensen's formulation:

“Questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven’t asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go. It hits your mind and bounces right off. You have to ask the question – you have to want to know – in order to open up the space for the answer to fit.”

http://signalvnoise.com/posts/3225-what-are-questions

This resonates well with what Tawheed Kader (founder: Toutapp) wrote recently, saying how things only started coming together for him after 3 years of building his business. Great intuition develops from bruises and bloody knuckles–time in the arena, as Dustin says.

http://www.tawheedkader.com/2014/02/it-takes-3-years/

I see this effect in all areas of achievement. I call it the difference between intellectual understanding and actual understanding and look for it whenever I'm attempting to learn something new.

One example is programming. (Most) Everyone knows that TDD is good practice. But every time TDD comes up in an HN thread, it's overloaded with people saying the exact same thing. They know they should TDD but they don't.

It took careful and frequent watching of Gary Bernhardt's videos before I could finally TDD. I would watch videos at night, then go to work the next day and try to apply what I learned. I kept running into snags, and I'd have to go back and watch the videos again to get a feel for the technique.

The techniques looked simple, easy even. But actual practice made a giant liar out of the appearance. Proper testing is a tough, complex, pain in the ass to learn. Every time you learn a new programming paradigm, you have to figure out how it's tested. And you have to keep doing this for as long as you grow as a programmer.

It's complexity of a sort that makes it very difficult to properly articulate. When you do, the advice looks simple, boring. Yet the simple, boring advice gets thrown out whenever you try to put it into actual practice, leaving you with cowboy code.

The reason you see so few people who actually TDD is because very few people end up putting their foot down, and digging deep into the "simple" advice to make real progress on the goal of actually TDDing their software.

Entrepreneurship seems awfully similar.

Did anyone notice Dustin's use of the words Obvious and Subtle? Considering that Medium, a competitor to Dustin's Svtle is owned by Obivous Co. Dustin always impresses me with his svbtleties.

I've found that cliched advice is often the best advice for this same reason. It's cliché for a reason - a lot of people have found it to be useful.

Many people try to give insightful or unique advice, but often the simplest advice is the best because it's hard to understand something until you've actually experienced it.

So advice given by experienced startup founders won't resonate unless you've already walked the path. I somewhat agree with the conclusion. But does this mean we don't learn much from reading or listening to things we don't have first hand experience with?

You only learn what you already half know.

This is true for any advice. You have to tailor the message to the receiver. Perhaps the speakers should consider their audience.