I feel lucky to have the job I have.
I work in a highly dynamic and inspiring environment, and I constantly pick up small nuggets of knowledge just by listening to standups or keeping an eye on our internal Slack. That alone got me thinking about the concept of learning.
I’ve always valued learning as one of the core pillars of who I am. I’ve always tried to know more, to stay curious, to live a life aimed at improving—bit by bit—every single day. The very well-known Japanese concept of Kaizen captures this perfectly: small, incremental improvements to all aspects of life that, over time, add up to meaningful change. Hopefully, bringing us closer to the person we want to become.
This idea feels almost foundational for software engineers. Or at least, it should be. We live in an ecosystem that never stops changing. New tools, new paradigms, new trade-offs every day. Not placing continuous learning among your core values might work for a while, but it eventually leads to stagnation. And stagnation is rarely a good place to be.
For most of my career, learning was also fueled by fear.
Fear of being left behind. Fear of not being where I should be. Fear of missing opportunities because I wasn’t learning fast enough. That fear translated into an almost compulsive need to know more, to study more, to constantly catch up. At the same time, I never felt like it was enough. Everyone around me seemed smarter, faster, more prepared. I felt out of my depth in every single job I had.
Lately, I’ve had the chance to slow down and reflect on what I actually value. What truly works for me. What has really been the ignition behind the good things in my life.
The answer was subtle, almost trivial, but still surprising.
I don’t think I was wrong to value learning so much. But I’ve realised it’s more nuanced than I thought. The real driver wasn’t learning itself. It was the willingness to learn.
There were periods in my life when learning felt like a job. I had rigid schedules, protected study time, long lists of things I had to know. My mood depended on how well I stuck to the plan, how consistent I was, whether I kept the streak alive. On paper, everything looked disciplined.
In reality, I wasn’t necessarily improving.
I was treating learning like a transaction. Time in, results out. A mechanical process. I wasn’t learning by heart. I was forcing it. It felt like being stuck at school when you don’t want to be there: present, compliant, but not truly engaged.
The shift happened when I wanted to know more.
Not for career progression. Not to tick boxes. Not to feel safe. Just to know more.
That click came from being surrounded by very smart people over the past few years, and it accelerated dramatically when I joined this new company. Working alongside people who are genuinely brilliant at what they do, enthusiastic about their craft, and generous with their knowledge made something clear to me: I didn’t have to learn, I wanted to.
And that changed everything.
Wanting to know more pushed me to dig deeper, to sit with concepts longer, to truly make them mine. I’ve never spent so much time on things that might look trivial from the outside, yet the dividends have been enormous. In a world where information is cheap and instantly accessible (thanks to the internet, AI, and endless media) raw knowledge has lost much of its value.
What matters more is learning how to think. Building strong mental models. Refining them. Letting them evolve. With that foundation, all the tools suddenly become leverage instead of crutches.
Learning alone was never enough. It lacked the spark.
Wanting, almost needing, to learn made me more curious, more patient, more willing to question things deeply. It helped me aim at becoming who I want to be, not who I thought I should be. Much of the self-imposed pressure faded away, replaced by energy and focus.
I feel like I’ve found that fire.
And I feel incredibly lucky that I found it before it went out.