I spent 1000h on Techmeme and didn’t learn a thing

Why reading without doing is just entertainment

Bootstrapping a startup is not easy and I do a lot of mistakes. Mistakes that I should not be doing because I have learned so much over the years on how important design is, how startups fail, etc. It turns out I did not learn a thing from spending hundreds (or ever thousands) of hours on Techmene, Hacker News and the like.

Here is why.

It’s when you need to do things in practice that actual learning happens. This is the moment when you either get it or you don’t. Consuming information without applying is not learning, it’s entertainment at best.

Now that I am practicing daily how to bootstrap a startup I find that Hacker News is a very good place to go for practical advice. Techmeme is still entertainment, nothing that I read there can be immediately applied.

So if being entertained is what you are looking for go ahead, it’s all there. But if you are looking to learn, don’t fool yourself, go and start something and then come back.