I wrote this letter to my past self, the one who had hesitations about joining Launch School a few months ago. I hope this letter helps anyone on the fence make a decision about whether or not joining is right for you. More importantly, I hope to see you on the other side of Launch School Prep, as a member of this amazing community. (I also realize how gratuitous it is to write self-congratulatory letters to yourself, but I hope you'll humor me 😆)

Dear Jay,

I know what you're thinking. After years of searching for the most efficient life hacks and dreaming of the perfect, four-hour workweek, it's hard to believe that you should sign up for a program that promises you'll move slowly and take zero shortcuts. Why go slow if you can go fast?

Because, like they say in the Special Forces:

Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.

I know you won't believe me when I tell you that joining Launch School will be the most powerful educational step you'll take in your life so far. But it will be. Not because you'll learn to program well—although that's definitely an important byproduct—but because you'll learn how to learn anything well. For a lifelong learner like you, there is no more powerful meta-skill than that. It will make anything and everything you learn moving forward easier to obtain and retain, forever. So what's wrong with slow when your timeline is the rest of your life?

I'll give it to you straight though: it won't be fun and games all the time. There will be times when you'll want to bang your head against a concrete wall so that the correct answer you've been searching for will fall out of your brain after hours of wracking it. You will grow sick and tired of typing, "On line 1, the program initializes local variable str and assigns it to a String object whose value is "hello world"" over and over again until you mumble it in your sleep to your poor wife. You will wonder what you're doing spending your sabbatical writing code for six hours a day on weekdays and few hours on each weekend.

But after two weeks of intense study, you'll pass your first written assessment. You will have been nervous, but you will have been confident in your ability to understand what a program is doing better than you have in your entire life.

Then you'll pass your first interview assessment, doing something that you only thought "real software engineers" did. You'll be nervous again, but all that drilling, all that repetition, will come forth in your mind and come to fruition in your pseudocode and the way you explain it.

You'll understand what two of your favorite basketball players, Kobe Bryant and Tim Duncan, knew: no one is too good for the fundamentals. That greatness—and more importantly, fulfillment—are felt not on days of great victory or achievement, but in the constant drilling, tweaking, exploring, and improving of a craft each day, when no one can see the impact but you.

You'll finally understand, after years of awful script kiddie code, learn-X-in-24-hours guides, and hack-and-slash what it means to really love a craft; it's exactly what it's like to love another person. It means showing up every day, even when you don't want to. It means pushing past any inconvenience or irritation you might feel and seeing the best to come. And it means committing to the long haul.

I get why you're apprehensive. That sounds like a lot of work to learn how to do something. But I hope you'll see that, more than any technical skill, you're learning to be a better person, someone committed to self-improvement and to the improvement of anyone else on this crazy journey with you.

So what are you waiting for? Get started on that prep course already. You can thank me later.

Your future self