You Don’t Need to Know Everything—You Need to Break Shit and Learn

New devs always ask:

“How do you know what that error means?”
“How did you debug that so fast?”
“Did you learn all this in school?”

No.
I learned it the real way:
By breaking shit. Fixing it. Breaking it again. Googling. Swearing. Reading docs I didn’t understand. And then doing it anyway.

Experience Isn’t Magic. It’s Scar Tissue.

You see confidence.
I see a graveyard of crashed apps, fried prod deployments, broken builds, and panicked rollback scripts.
This isn’t wisdom. It’s trauma with stack traces.

If you’ve never felt your soul leave your body after pushing to the wrong branch, or accidentally nuked a database because you forgot --dry-run,
you haven’t lived yet.

The scars make you faster. The failure makes you smarter.
You don’t gain experience by reading about fires.
You gain it by being the one holding the hose at 2 a.m.

Stop Trying to Memorize. Start Trying to Understand.

You don’t need to know every method in the language.
You don’t need to memorize the HTTP status codes like you’re prepping for trivia night.

What you need is curiosity and the nerve to stay in the fight when everything breaks.

When you hit a wall, do you:

• Freeze?
• Wait for someone else?
• Copy-paste from Stack Overflow and hope?

Or do you dig in, take it apart, and figure out why it broke—even if it takes you all damn day?

That’s the real interview. And it never ends.

This Industry Rewards Grit, Not Perfection

The best devs I’ve ever worked with aren’t the ones with the fanciest degrees or the cleanest code.
They’re the ones who never stop learning.
The ones who aren’t afraid to ask dumb questions.
The ones who drop into a failing repo like it’s a warzone and say, “Alright, let’s figure this out.”

They know that confidence doesn’t come from knowing everything—
It comes from knowing you can figure it out.

Good Leaders Don’t Expect You to Know—They Expect You to Grow

If your manager expects you to have all the answers on day one,
they’re not a leader—they’re a liability.

Real leadership gives you room to fail safely—then pushes you to grow from it.
It builds a culture where you’re not afraid to say “I don’t know, but I’ll find out.”

Because that’s the attitude that scales. That’s the mindset that survives.

So here’s the truth they don’t put on job descriptions:

You don’t need to know everything.
You need to show up, break shit, and learn like hell.

Lead. Don’t Ctrl.