The Big Idea
Your brain rewires itself based on what you practice. If you stop practicing hard things, you slowly lose the ability to do them.
Early in my career I remember sitting at a bar with two close friends, laughing about something we called "information addiction."
It would only take a few minutes of observation to see it: if we didn't know something, we googled it -- immediately.
Movie trivia? Google it. Strange symptom after a long flight? Google it. When was Sean Connery born? Google it.
At the time this felt revolutionary. As millennials, we grew in the first generation where knowledge was always within reach. Expertise wasn't something locked inside universities or trade guilds anymore. It was a few searches away.
That experience shaped a lot of how I think about my generation. The defining skill millennials developed wasn't memorization. It was learning how to learn. If you could research, synthesize, and experiment, there was almost no problem you couldn't teach yourself to solve.
But something has changed in the last few years.
The internet used to give you information. Now it increasingly gives you answers (whether or not they're correct is another story).
- Why read Hamlet when an LLM can summarize it perfectly?
- Why grind through calculus when a model can solve every step instantly?
- Why learn Cantonese if a phone can translate the conversation for you?
The temptation is obvious... effort is optional now.
And human beings are very good at choosing the easier path.
I'm not immune to this either. I use LLMs all the time; they're incredible tools. They help me write code faster, summarize documents, and explore ideas in ways that would have taken much longer even a few years ago.
I've come to realize there's an important difference between getting an answer and learning something.
The difference is happening inside your brain.
Neuroplasticity
There's a concept in neuroscience called neuroplasticity, which describes the brain's ability to reorganize itself based on how it's used.
In simple terms: the more you do something, the stronger the neural pathways supporting that activity become. Practice literally changes the structure of your brain. And if you stop practicing something long enough, those pathways weaken.
In other words: use it or lose it is a real thing.
That's why musicians practice. It's why I was fluent in Spanish after high school, but was barely conversational 15 years later. It's why someone who writes code every day develops instincts that no tutorial can fully explain.
Learning is not just absorbing information. It's building physical circuitry.
And circuitry only forms through effort.
Some Lessons Are Best Learned the Hard Way
I can generate code with Claude or Codex. But I won't write great software unless I keep practicing and scrutinizing my code.
I can translate a paragraph of Spanish instantly with Google Translate. But I can't actually understand a conversation unless I spend years training my ear and vocabulary.
The same thing is true with music. The more often I pick up my guitar, the better my playing becomes. There's no shortcut to becoming a better musician.
Some knowledge only exists on the other side of repetition.
Which is why I've started to believe something that sounds slightly old-fashioned:
Some lessons are best learned the hard way.
Not because technology is bad. Not because efficiency is wrong. But because your brain still runs on the same rules it always has.
If we stop practicing difficult things, we eventually lose the ability to do them.
A Small Suggestion
So here's my suggestion: Pick at least one thing in your life that you're willing to learn the hard way.
Something where progress comes slowly. Something where you have to practice even when it's frustrating. Something where the only real path forward is repetition.
For me, it's been keeping up with music and language learning.
Neither of them can be optimized away. Both of them reward patience. And both of them sharpen a part of my brain that shortcuts can't reach. They challenge and strengthen parts of my brain that I wouldn't otherwise use, and help me have real, meaningful connections with other people in my life. They create opportunity, empathy, and human connection.
If you want to keep your wit sharp in an age of instant answers, make sure there's at least one thing you're still willing to practice the slow way.
More from me this week
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Speaking of practicing music, I recently shipped the guitar tuner I always wanted - Guithub is a tiny little PWA for tuning your instrument on the fly. It has all the features I ever wanted: support for multiple tunings, capo positioning, as well as bass guitar, ukulele, banjo, and more. I also got to play with an aesthetic I like. If you're a musician, give it a look! Proper launch announcement coming soon.
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My interview with Alex from Supergood for the APIs You Won't Hate podcast. Alex is a supremely thoughtful guy, and his company is building a super interesting product. Supergood is building unofficial APIs for everything - really.
