Sometimes an unplanned life pushes you into places you never expected to stand.
About a week ago, I was under a shelter on the street, waiting out the rain with a few other random people. Then a young lady walked up. She had a big backpack on her shoulders and another bag in her hand. She joined the group under the shelter, and one by one, she turned to each person and asked, "I sell things, would you like to see it?"
Everyone said no. Nobody even asked what she was selling.
I noticed something in that moment, and honestly, I felt a little ashamed that I didn't say anything to her about it. Her opening line was weak. Not because she wasn't trying, she clearly was, out in the rain, going person to person. But she never actually gave anyone a reason to say yes. She skipped straight to "buy this" without ever identifying a single problem any of us might have had that her products could solve.
Real sales doesn't start with the product. It starts with a problem, and an idea for solving it. Skip that step, and you're just asking strangers to want something for no reason, which almost never works.
I didn't correct her. I just stood there. But it stuck with me, because it pointed at something bigger than that one moment under the shelter.
Whatever happens in life, information is one of the most valuable things you can carry. As someone in tech, I believe data is one of life's most essential tools, because real decisions get made based on it. You get hired because there's data proving you're capable. You communicate with someone across a language barrier because you both hold the shared knowledge needed to understand each other. Information, applied correctly, is what turns effort into results.
That lady wasn't lacking effort. She was out there, in the rain, actually trying. What she was missing was the specific knowledge of how to make that effort land. And I think that gap, effort without the right information, is where a lot of us get stuck, in sales, in tech, in anything.
Since I couldn't tell her in that moment, I'll say it here instead, to anyone reading this: you become the best version of what you're doing by getting the right information, and then actually practicing it, not just collecting it. Keep pushing past where you already are, and then keep pushing again once you get there too.
That's honestly part of why I keep going with web development, even on the days I feel tired of it. I know there's still more to learn, and I've been at this long enough now to understand certain things I didn't understand when I started. The knowledge compounds if you stay with it.
Keep pushing.
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