You can just do things and see what happens

Dealing with people, it doesn't take long to realise that you are surrounded by either doers or talkers. You get people who do things and you get people who talk about or think about doing things (but never do).

It's been 5 years since I quit my job. Before I quit my job I spent 12 years at school and 4 years at university studying Mechanical Engineering.

In the last 2 years, I have learnt the most of any time period in my life. Why is this?

I believe one of the main reasons is that we've been conditioned to fit into "the way things are done", "know our place" and "stay in our lane".

Experimentation leads to discovery

To give a real world example most people will understand, here's how a traditional job works:

• You have to be in the office at 08:00 every day of the week
• You have to do exactly as you are told or risk getting a warning or be fired
• It's discouraged to interfere with how other departments do their job
• It's discouraged to spend time on google "Researching" or watching Youtube videos
• Suggestions of how things could be done are often seen as negativity

You don't need to be a genius to know that the above working conditions won't lead to any new discoveries and it won't foster innovation.

Contrast that to one of my days

• I wake up at 6am (unless I was struck by inspiration the previous night and coded until 3am).
• I make coffee and I have an idea of how this blog could be better.
• I then go ahead and spend the entire day going down a rabbit hole and struggling with servers, converting my old blog posts into a new format, setting up new email sending etc.

To most people, this might sound like an absolute waste of a day, and if I was still working at my old job, this would definitely have gotten me into heaps of trouble.

But during the process I learnt multiple technical lessons regarding programming, servers and overall expanded my toolkit. I can 100% guarantee you that what I learnt by wasting a day will benefit me in the future. These small skills compound over time and result in me being a much better software developer.

I understand that most people cannot waste a whole day going down these rabbit holes, but there is a reason I am in the position to do it. More about that later.

Here are some more ways I wasted time which lead to greater things

• I wanted to start investing in high school, but I was told by brokers aka gatekeepers to wait until I turn 18. So I asked my parents for money (not a gift) when I turned 18 and started investing in stocks during my matric year. I still remember sitting in class nervous about my stocks and asking my teacher to go to the bathroom to do a trade. I learned a lot about companies, investing and economics and later on the money I made enabled me to buy an engagement ring at 21 and get married at 22, without being employed.
• Taught myself to weld and welded my dad a braai, a security gate, built myself a braai and I have fixed many things since then that I would have needed to pay someone to do.
• After high school I decided that I want to do powerlifting. I started training 3-4 times per week and competing - ended up going to World Powerlifting Championships in Belarus and placed 16th.
• I had no gym in my home town, so I could not train when I went home during breaks so built myself a squat rack, bench press + deadlift platform from wood.
• Tried building home-made rockets and bombs during holidays - built a rocket that reach an altitude of 300+ meters. (Only worked after many hours of research into rocket engines)
• Tried to grow seeds in my university room with an automated watering and lights system which I had to program myself on an Arduino. (This taught me that coding gives you superpowers)
• Built a 3D printer in my garage from scratch.
• Built and programmed my own geyser timer.
• Grew cannabis in my back yard, made myself brownies and went on a 24 hour trip which was terrible. (never consumed weed again😂)
• During my first year out of university had an audacious goal of building a crowdfunding website. No one wanted to invest (except my parents, bless them) - wasted the 75k they invested, by relying on 3rd party coders. After that decided to code it myself. Built my first real website. We raised R100k for one charity and then I stopped the business, because it was not profitable and we would need a lot more capital to market it.
• Tried multiple ways to make money with websites. The most random one was a drop-shipping store which sold pet toys to anyone in the world. Sold one toy to someone in USA, the toy was shipped from China and actually arrived. Taught me about Facebook and Google Ads.
• Tried and failed with many other websites.
• At last a website worked during Covid 19 (dailywine.co.za) - which allowed me to quit my job and pursue my entrepreneurial dream.
• Since then I have built multiple websites. Some for clients, a few for myself and I have added multiple income streams using this.
• Got involved with Kiki & Co to revive the business - not a massive success, but I made lifelong friends in the process.
• 2 years ago I spent multiple days trying to get my own personal server running. Failed many times - today I have 3 servers running in multiple locations and I am self-hosting a lot of services which used to cost my business a lot of money each month.
• I hated having to book our squash courts using pen and paper, which is why I bought squashbooking.com and built a free platform for squash bookings, pitched it to our squash club and now we are using it for bookings.

A lot of these things might seem unrelated, but if you look a bit deeper, you will find that there is a definite thread running through all of them.

Glass Balls vs Rubber Balls

The glass versus rubber balls analogy is a simple way to think about priorities and risk in life or work. Picture yourself juggling a bunch of balls—some are made of glass, others rubber. The glass balls are the critical, fragile things: they’ll shatter if you drop them, so they demand your attention. The rubber balls? They’re the smaller, less urgent stuff—they can bounce, roll away, and take a hit without breaking. The point is to know the difference and not waste energy chasing every rubber ball when the glass ones are in the air. It’s about focusing on what truly matters while letting the rest sort itself out.

When you let those rubber balls roll around a bit, you free up your hands—and your head—to tinker, experiment, and screw up without panic. That’s where the magic happens: innovation sparks when you’re not afraid to drop the stuff that can handle a fall, giving you space to swing big, learn fast, and build something new.