In the learning phase, student years, people with common interest form groups or clubs. This becomes something like a bubble. For people outside, this bubble feels elusive. For people inside, it feels like the bubble, a competence bubble, is exhaustive. If you are in one of these bubbles, you probably feel good about yourself, you probably wouldn’t consider someone outside the bubble to be good on the skill.

For people outside the bubble, you are in no way left out. Don’t let the bubble make you feel little. Divorce your confidence from competence. People with unearned confidence have done a lot of good to this world and themselves. Use that. Just, be, confident. The only thing to keep in mind is to show up every single day, without fail, to do the task. That is all there is. Nothing else. I have seen a lot of bubbles form like this. The people inside very proud. There isn’t much different between us now. There never was. Read about Anna Kiesenhofer, PhD in Mathematics and Olympics 2021 cycling champion! Can you guess how she got there ? By showing up everyday. It is literally impossible to not get good in something by doing it everyday. There is no force in the world that can stop compounding.

There is one thing people have to fight. It is the status-quo bias. Do not settle for getting a good GPA. It sure helps for a bit, but you cannot stop there. You really need to venture out, and the only best time for trying out is college. The downside of status-quo bias is that people form an action bias later in life. That is perfectly misplaced. You venture out early in life and then very gradually slow down.

If you are inside a bubble, always look for people in the outside. You are losing out on opportunities if you think your next collaborator should be from the inside. It is stupid.

In a way, even college degrees are weird bubbles, based on tests absolutely out of sync with the course. Nothing is stopping someone from learning CS, or tweaking around with electronics. People who breakout of their scripted path, the course they had to join, are bound to be more successful.