Issue #17: School Didn't Teach You to Learn. It Taught You to Wait for Permission.

I need to tell you about something I just realized about myself and I think it's running in your life too.

It's not about what you don't know. It's about something school installed in you that survived years of evidence proving it wrong.

Let me show you what I mean.

From my second year of pharmacy school onwards, I was building software on the side.

Not for class and not because anyone told me to. I just saw problems and built things to solve them.

So I built an e-library for my classmates with all our textbooks and past questions. Then a full ERP system for the student association. Then a pharmacy management application that I was actually selling to real pharmacies by final year.

Nobody gave me permission to start any of those. I just started.

Then COVID hit and school suspended and I suddenly had time. So I made a decision: I was going to take coding seriously as a career path, not just a side thing.

Here's what I did next.

I looked for a program to enroll in.

Think about that for a second.

I had been building functional software for years and I had paying clients and I had proof that I could build things people would pay for.

But something in me said this doesn't count as a real path until I enroll in a program that someone else designed and authorized.

I didn't need to learn from the beginning. I needed permission to take it seriously.

Fast forward to my hospital year as a pharmacist.

The government was eight months late paying our salaries and my colleagues were picking up extra pharmacy shifts to survive.

So I organized a three-day digital skills summit and sold the recordings and an ebook. Made more in those three days than a third of my monthly pharmacist salary.

Then I built a piece of software and sold it for the equivalent of my entire monthly salary.

So I was making more money from software, working fewer hours, than from the profession I'd spent six years in school for.

The evidence was clear. I could do this and the market was already paying me.

But when my hospital year ended and the director of pharmacy offered me a promotion and a clear career path, I didn't walk away with confidence in what I'd already built.

I walked away with a plan to go back to school.

Not because I needed more knowledge. I had proof I could build things and sell them.

Because the transition didn't feel legitimate without another institution standing behind it.

You see the pattern?

The evidence kept saying one thing and my reflex kept doing something completely different.

And the reflex was winning.

The bootcamp taught me useful things. Data structures I'd missed and algorithms and low-level programming. The fundamentals you only get by going through them systematically.

But that's not what got me the job offer six months in.

When I started the bootcamp, I made a decision that had nothing to do with the curriculum.

I started posting on Twitter every single day about what I was learning. What I was building and what I was stuck on and what I'd just figured out.

I started a technical blog and published consistently and I did live coding sessions on YouTube where people watched me write code in real time and get things wrong in real time.

I was not qualified to do this. I was few months into a bootcamp and I had more questions than answers.

But I'd made it public and that meant the option of waiting until I felt ready was gone.

The commitment was external and the accountability was environmental. So my brain couldn't run its sophisticated case for "needing more preparation" anymore because people were watching.

Within six months I had partnership offers and after 9 months, a full-time job offer from ALX Africa to help build their curriculum. Before the bootcamp finished. Before I had the certificate.

Proof of work beat the permission structure.

Here's what school actually did.

It didn't just teach you subjects. It installed something deeper.

A belief so strong it survived years of contradicting evidence. That learning only counts when it's been authorized and that your work isn't real until an institution verifies it. That you're not a developer until you have the certification and not a writer until you're published and not ready to call yourself something until someone qualified decides you are.

I had paying clients and I still went back to school because the transition didn't feel legitimate without it.

That's not a knowledge gap. That's a conditioning problem.

And here's the line I need you to sit with:

You don't build proof of competence by accumulating credentials. You build it by removing the permission structure and building something anyway.

Before you feel ready and in public where the commitment removes the option of waiting.

That's what the high school notebook was. I was writing code by hand in a notebook because I couldn't wait for a class to teach it. No permission structure existed to wait for so I just started.

That's what the Twitter account was years later. I created that constraint on purpose because I finally understood what it was doing. It removed the option of waiting.

You're probably waiting for something right now.

Waiting to feel ready before you start building publicly and waiting to finish the course before you call yourself what you're learning to become and waiting for someone to verify that you're qualified before you do the work you already know how to do.

I'm not saying credentials don't matter. The bootcamp taught me real things I was missing.

But the credential didn't get me the job. The public building did.

The credential didn't make the transition legitimate. The proof of work did.

So here's what I want you to do this week.

Name the one thing you've been waiting to feel ready for before you start building it. Not a category. The specific thing.

Then find the smallest way to make it public before you feel ready.

Not the finished version. The first version. The version you're embarrassed enough by that you'll have to keep going just to prove you're getting better.

Post about what you're learning and share the project you're building and show the code you're writing and talk about the problem you're trying to solve.

Make the commitment external so your brain can't talk you into waiting longer.

Because the thing keeping you stuck isn't the gap in your skills.

It's the belief that you need authorization to start closing it.

Nobody's coming to give you permission.

And the moment you realize that, you're already further along than most people ever get.

Obed