Feb 6, 2021
You’re All Wrong About Baby Steps
Baby steps are culturally minimized and regularly denigrated as the smallest, least-significant action taken on a given path. For example, “Oh at least he has a job at a convenience store working fifteen hours a week. Something’s better than nothing.” That’s toxic bullshit antithetical to our exponentially-accelerating technological society. I’ll explain…
Let’s use the baby step analogy in reverse to illuminate the glaring truth: A “baby’s step” is the single greatest step any of us will ever take. Yes, even Neil Armstrong. Yes, even Usain Bolt. (Although I’m not going to say it was the greatest step for the first WWII soldier to step foot on the beach at Normandy, or Rosa Parks turning to sit in the front row, or John Lewis braving the bridge in Selma, or countless other brave souls pioneering their way past whatever obstacles they faced, prevailing while laying a path others could follow.)
- Okay, back to the logic.* Our first step is akin to invention. We have to invent a way to do something we’ve never done before. It matters not how many billions of others have done it before or how many times a parent demonstrates how to walk. No, it’s still an incredible feat. In the tech world the “Baby’s Step” is known as going from “0 to 1”, as-in going from nothing to something. It’s still creation because YOU have never done it before. Every step that follows, no matter how fast or far it takes you, is merely incremental.
The baby step is the biggest step. It’s also the hardest. And it’s the most important to get right. Let’s start giving baby steps the respect they deserve.
