When I was eleven, my uncle gave me my first PC: a Pentium III with 20GB of hard drive space, 32MB VGA, 192MB of RAM, and a CD ROM. To a kid it felt like a portal to the future. It was also, almost immediately, a machine full of problems.
I was not the kind to shy away from that. I dove in headfirst and tried to fix whatever went wrong, and plenty went wrong. At the beginning I mostly failed. I kept going anyway, because I had one goal, which was to get my little PC working no matter what. Over time I started learning from the mistakes instead of just repeating them.
Slowly it became stable, at least by my standards. Then something else would break. By then I had enough experience from the earlier attempts to keep moving, and I started tinkering with the hardware itself: hard drive crashes, RAM failures, power supply problems, even trouble with the CPU. I faced all of it.
We did not have the money for new parts, so I worked with used components. That never mattered to me. I only wanted to keep learning and fixing.
What I am proud of is that I learned all of it on my own, by experimenting and not giving up. I eventually replaced every part of that old PC, turning it into something almost entirely new. I had so many spare parts left over that I built a second PC out of them.
Looking back, that taught me something invaluable: there is no better way to learn than doing it yourself. The knowledge you gain through trial and error stays with you, and it never gets old. I still work this way, always pushing myself to explore new things, and it is the approach that has had the greatest impact on anything I have achieved.
So to anyone just starting out, my advice is simple. Learn by yourself. It is tough at the beginning and you will make mistakes, but the rewards at the end are worth it. Don't give up, because the journey is what makes success even more beautiful.
Wishing all of you the best on your learning journey.
