“Hello World” is not a finish line.

It’s a saddening number; the number of developers in the world who have started learning something, and stopped after “Hello World.”

But no one ever said “Hello World” was a finish line. That it means you’re done, you’ve learned it, you forked the repo, you can add it to your LinkedIn, you can slap a sticker on your laptop…

You haven’t felt the soil of the trenches yet. You haven’t failed. You haven’t grown.

Making it to “Hello World” is the beginning of an unstoppable journey. It’s a step that represents your motivation, that shows you were inspired. It’s what leads you to unleashing potential.

But if you hold back here, now, when you’ve got a taste of the knowledge you can soon wield…if you hold back now, then what kind of legacy will you leave behind? A series of Hello World apps?

Learning. Knowledge. Inspiration.

That’s step one. Eventually though, it’s time to giddy up.

Follow through, take the knowledge and build, create, and build more momentum. That’s where true growth comes from. Knowledge is power, heroes, and you have to use it to grow stronger, more experienced, to fail more, to build more confidence, to stand taller.

Learning is a waste of time if you’re not doing something with it. If you’re not pushing beyond Hello World.

Piotr, Kelvin and Josh are all developers at my company, X-Team.

Piotr took knowledge, passion and a little spark of motivation and he built the Angular 2 starter kit.

Kelvin was inspired by React Native, and he spent months in a cave learning and pushing himself and motivating himself to find the time to finally get an awesome League of Legends app out there.

Josh wasn’t only inspired by CSS Modules, he didn’t just preach about it on our blog or give talks about it in Australia (which he did do both), he jumped in and started contributing, and still jumps in every day helping to take that OS project to the next-gen of front-end.

This post is a tribute to the ones who don’t just stop after the egghead course, the ones who don’t see Hello World as a finish line, but the start of a legacy.

This is a tribute to the ‪#‎unstoppable‬.

Ryan Chartrand is the CEO of X-Team, a global team of extraordinary remote developers who can join your team and start executing today.

Check out and subscribe to X-Team’s blog at http://x-team.com/blog