Hinderous vs helpful learning

Mac’s tweet got me thinking about my own information and media diet.

I often wonder if all the information out there about building businesses hurts us more than helps us.

Endlessly consuming such information gives us the false feeling we’re making progress.

If we implemented what we’ve learned before consuming more, we’d be way further along.

– @macmartine on Twitter

For me, all the noise and info about indie hacking and entrepreneurship is definitely hurting more than it helps now.

In the early days when I just started indie hacking, drinking from that firehose of info and everyone building in public significantly helped, because everything was so new. I needed to learn how to code, how to market, how to tweet, how to design, what the indie hacker playbook was. Everything.

But over time, I made more mistakes because I was blindly following the playbook. It started to hinder me more and more.

That’s why one of my goal this year is to just follow my intuition, do my own thing, even if it flies against conventional wisdom.

That’s why I built a boilerplate on HTML, CSS and JS, not NextJS, even though that’s where the money seems to be. That’s why I didn’t launch it on Product Hunt. Maybe I’ll make even more mistakes from doing that, but at least it’s mistakes and learning from mistakes that’s in service of nurturing my intuition.

Following intuition is such an underrated skill for entrepreneurs. I feel that all learning we do as entrepreneurs should be in service of developing this skill.

Though caveat is… I don’t think I could even try to follow my intuition when I just started, because I had zero experience, knowledge and tactics. When there’s nothing for intuition to leverage on, that spidey sense would be all over the place. Following it would just lead to disaster.

So maybe apprenticing for a bit; build up some experience and knowledge; accumulate some battle scars, then follow intuition.

Maybe it’s time for me to stop trying to accumulate knowledge so much, but instead practice intuition more.