Your new rabbit hole.
The hardest move in learning anything new has always been the first one. Here's why it's never been easier to make it, and how to go down the rabbit hole of "doing."
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This essay was originally published here.
I’ve been itching to rebuild my website for at least a year. And as I poked around for inspiration, I noticed my buddy, Paul Millerd, rebuilt his site with Claude Code.
I was a bit familiar with Claude Code, having seen articles and videos all over X. They all promise the same thing: the most comprehensive, step-by-step, become a master of Claude Code, biggest, best, baddest tutorial online. And as soon as I save one, another one pops up, promising to be even better.
Over several months, my bookmarks folder grew with more of these tutorials. And I kept telling myself that one day, when the timing was right, I’d sit down and learn Claude Code. But somewhere in the back of my mind, I was intimidated. I’m not a developer, and I don’t know how to code. And most of what I’d seen made me feel like this was a tool for a specific kind of person, and I wasn’t that person.
But one morning a couple of months ago, I decided to open the latest and greatest video, press play, and see if I could confirm what I suspected about myself.
The instructor was young, kind of cocky, and moving fast between a bunch of tools I’d never seen before. He threw around terms I didn’t recognize, and in less than ten minutes, I felt lost and frustrated. I’m a smart enough person, and I can figure most things out by being curious. But this wasn’t clicking for me.
So, out of frustration more than anything, I closed the video, opened regular old Claude, and typed something like:
“How do I get started with Claude Code? Explain it to me like I’m in sixth grade.”
The first step, it told me, was to open the Terminal application on my Mac.
I was familiar with the Terminal app, but I didn’t know what it connected to, or what the heck it did, or why it even existed. So I did the next logical thing I could think of. I asked another “dumb question.”
“Can you explain what the Terminal app does and how to use it, like I’m in sixth grade?”
Sixty minutes and eight or nine simple questions later, I’d opened a free GitHub account, a Vercel account, and I was redesigning a Framer template that caught my eye. I was working with more precision and control than I’d ever had over any of my previous websites. I was stunned by how fast I went from clueless to building in real time.
That was just sixty days ago. And since then, I’ve completed my brand new website, replaced more than $900 in monthly software costs (by rebuilding those tools myself), developed helpful workflow tools, and even set up an admin dashboard to track my major metrics. The workspace I’ve built is incredibly powerful.
And all of this started with trying to figure out how the Terminal app works.
A few weeks ago, I took a three-hour hike with my friend David. David is one of the smartest, most capable builders I know. So when I started talking about Claude Code and just how much I’m enjoying it, I expected him to already be using it. But instead, he said:
“I’ve got like four or five YouTube videos saved that are supposed to be the best tutorials for getting started.”
Of course, I laughed. Because he was going through the same thing I did. Sitting on a pile of long videos, waiting to feel ready. And I don’t think this behavior is unusual.
I actually think the content is the trap.
Not because the tutorials are bad. Many of them are probably great, especially for people with a good baseline of knowledge.
But think about what that two-hour YouTube tutorial is actually optimized for. It’s built for watch time. For clicks. And for acquiring more subscribers. So the longer and more comprehensive the video, the better it performs. The instructor isn’t incentivized by whether you actually get started on your Claude Code project. He’s incentivized by whether you watch.
So the content gets bigger and more comprehensive over time. More jargon and more tools and more prerequisites and more complicated stuff. And the outcome is that you feel like you need to consume everything before you’re qualified to even begin. So you save it, because it looks thorough and authoritative and like the perfect thing you need to get off your butt and start moving.
But saving content has the opposite effect of what we hope. We think it’s the key to getting started. But in reality, it delays us. I know because I saved tutorials for months and made zero progress. And then I asked one simple question and made more progress in sixty minutes than I had in sixty days.
I did one of the most important things you can possibly do as an entrepreneur:
I went from zero to one.
The two-hour deep dive taught by someone who forgot what it feels like to know absolutely nothing isn’t going to get you from zero to one. It’s going to keep you at zero, feeling like you’re further away than ever from getting to one.
And the answer to “How do I get started?” has never been more available in human history. You can type the most basic question you can think of into AI and get a patient, useful answer in seconds.
So I started by asking how to get started. Meta stuff. Then I asked what a terminal window was. Then I asked what to type into it. Then I asked what to do after that. The questions were embarrassingly simple. But there’s no need to feel stupid or embarrassed. Because there’s no eye roll when doing research in Claude or ChatGPT or whatever AI you like to use. It’ll never say, “Seriously, you don’t know that!?”
It just gives you an answer, and the next step you need to move forward.
Getting from zero to one is the hardest part of learning anything new. And that’ll never change. What has changed is that you now have access to a tool that will hold your hand and walk you wherever you want to go. You don’t have to suffer with jargon or lingo or speed or feeling silly. You just ask the dumb questions, follow the instructions, and keep going. The further along you get, the more confidence you build, and the more confidence you build, the further you go.
It doesn’t matter what you’re trying to learn. If you’ve got a folder sitting on your computer, full of videos and guides you’ve been meaning to get to, just forget it.
Open Claude (or whatever LLM you like) instead. Type the simplest version of the question you’ve been putting off. And ask it to explain it to you like you’re in sixth grade. See what it says, take the first step, and then ask your next question. And pretty soon, you’ll find yourself down a brand new rabbit hole. A rabbit hole of doing instead of bookmarking.
I’m so glad I finally did this one random morning in my pajamas. It’s unlocked so much power for the future of my work. And I hope that with this nudge back to simple questions, you can do the same for your work.
So here’s my question for this week: What’s the one thing you’ve been putting off that you could solve today by simply asking, “How do I get started?”
Reply below and tell me about it.
That’s all for this week.
See you next Saturday.
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Only by building do you start to fall. Only by falling do you begin to understand that there is a gap between where you are and where you want to be.
You don't take ownership by watching a YouTube tutorial. You take ownership by building something.