Repetition is the mother of skill, and I believed that for years without really understanding what it buys you. Do a thing a thousand times and it stops taking effort, that's the first thing you get, speed. The second thing takes much longer to arrive. You start noticing that something is wrong before you can explain why it's wrong, and at that point you're not working a checklist anymore, you're reading the situation. What nobody tells you is that none of it stops you from breaking things. Last week I shipped a feature in Radi8 with two thousand passing tests and no working screen. Every check green, the code doing exactly what the spec told it to do, and for an actual person using it the screen simply never appeared. Twenty-five years of building companies did not prevent that! What those years did was collapse the distance between the mistake and the fix. Shipped at 5:41 in the afternoon, fixed by 10:17 that night, and most of those four and a half hours was finding it rather than repairing it. Early in my career the same class of problem took a week, and not because we were worse at the work. The loop was slower. You found it in testing, wrote it up, waited for the next build, waited for the release window, waited for someone else's shift to end. The repair itself was never the slow part, it was the distance between people. So that's what the reps actually buy you... a shorter loop, and a lesson that stays learned. Nobody gets a clean record. If you're early into building something of your own, the mistakes aren't evidence that you're not cut out for this, they're just the cost of the reps. The only thing that actually stops people is staying down. What used to cost you a month and now costs you an afternoon? #IndependentConsultant #Coaching #GoingIndependent #ThoughtLeadership