september 2025
.
.
.
i’ve been playing soccer since i was ten.
over the years, i’ve played against all kinds of players—the fast ones, the technical ones, the ones who seem to see the game two steps ahead. if you asked me which type i found hardest to deal with, you might expect one of those.
it isn’t.
the hardest players to play against are beginners. not the talented beginners, just the ones who don’t really know what they are doing.
they are difficult in a way that’s hard to explain if you haven’t experienced it. they run too much. they chase the ball when they shouldn’t. they make decisions that don’t follow any recognizable logic. sometimes they accidentally do something effective, but even when they don’t, they are exhausting to deal with.
it’s not that they are better. it’s that they are unpredictable.
experienced players, no matter how skilled, operate within a system. they have learned patterns—when to press, when to hold, how to position themselves. even creativity tends to stay within certain boundaries. you can prepare for them.
beginners don’t have boundaries yet.
they haven’t learned what’s “correct,” which means they also haven’t learned what not to try. so they try everything. most of it doesn’t work, but some of it does, and, more importantly, they are learning at a pace that seems almost unfair.
this doesn’t just happen in soccer.
you see it in programming. in design. in business. in anything where skill compounds over time. the people who improve the fastest at the beginning are often the ones who don’t know enough to be cautious.
they are not burdened by best practices. they are not optimizing for efficiency. they are just trying things.
if you think about it, “not knowing” is a kind of asset. it removes constraints. it lowers the cost of being wrong, because you don’t have a reputation to protect or a system to maintain. you can afford to be inefficient, and inefficiency is often where learning happens.
experienced people have a different problem.
they know what works, which is useful, but it also narrows their range. over time, they build a kind of internal map, and like any map, it leaves things out. the danger is not that the map is wrong, but that it feels complete.
once you feel like you understand the terrain, you stop exploring.
this is why large companies often lose to small ones. it’s not just about speed or resources. it’s that startups are still in the phase of trying everything. they haven’t learned enough to limit themselves. corporations, on the other hand, have accumulated too much knowledge to move freely. every decision has context, history, and consequences.
in other words, they know too much.
there’s a moment, somewhere between being a beginner and becoming an expert, where learning slows down. not because there’s nothing left to learn, but because you’ve become selective about what you are willing to try.
the paradox is that the very thing that helped you improve (gaining knowledge) starts to get in your way.
so the real skill isn’t just learning. it’s preserving the ability to learn.
the beginners you struggle against on a soccer field don’t stay that way forever. eventually, they pick up patterns, and their unpredictability fades. they become easier to read, even as they become more skilled.
unless they manage to keep something from their beginner phase, the willingness to try things that might not work.
that’s rare.
most people trade curiosity for competence. it’s a reasonable trade. competence is valuable. but if you trade too much of it, you end up stuck with a fixed way of doing things, competing against people who haven’t yet learned their limits.
and those people are dangerous.
not because they are better, but because they are still becoming better at a rate you have forgotten is possible.
so when you are starting something new, the fact that you don’t know what you are doing isn’t just a disadvantage.
it's the privilege. you just need to accept that you don't know shit yet, take action, and be the best learner possible.
img source: arsenal