For a long time, I chased mastery through motionless effort. Courses stacked on courses. Books underlined, then shelved. Frameworks built on other frameworks that never saw daylight. The learning became its own job, something that kept my hands busy while my courage rested.
In my thirties I fell into it completely. Every new skill looked like a doorway. Coding. Cybersecurity. Automation. Change management. Each one promised progress and gave me a reason to wait a little longer before doing the real thing.
Time passed quietly. The world never asked for my preparation, content to sit by and wait for me to move.
Work does not begin with confidence. It begins the first time you try something that can fail in public. You learn what effort tastes like, and the taste stays with you. It mixes with fatigue and small humiliation and the slow rhythm of repetition. There is no substitute for that rhythm.
“Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers” ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson
Years of managing people, fixing systems, and holding things together built more knowledge than any book could hold. The memory of doing became a kind of map, one that had been forming while I thought I was still getting ready. The foundation was always there; I had only stopped feeling it under my feet.
The work feels steady now. Each task draws a line to another, each motion recalls an older motion. The hands find their rhythm again. The axe is already sharp.
People sometimes call my way of thinking “systems-oriented.” I’ve read the books they mean, and the language feels distant from what I know. My sense of it lives closer to muscle memory.
A batter sees a pitch not through knowledge but through habit. Thousands of repetitions teach the body how to act without thought. The same thing happens in work that has lasted long enough to become second nature. No amount of Youtube learning will lead to a single successful at-bat against a seasoned pitcher.
The years leave marks. Each scar carries a story that no one needs to hear aloud. They are not trophies. They are records of time spent inside the effort. They tell you that you’ve earned the right to build from what remains.