Tuesday morning, September 3rd. Watching someone follow a 47-step tutorial to do something that could be figured out in 10 minutes of experimentation, wondering when we became so afraid of not knowing exactly what comes next.

The Certainty Addiction

Here's an uncomfortable truth: the abundance of tutorials, guides, and step-by-step instructions isn't making us more capable—it's making us more dependent. We've created a culture that prioritizes following procedures over developing judgment, eliminating uncertainty over building resilience.

The tutorial promise is seductive: do exactly these things in exactly this order and you'll get exactly this result. No ambiguity, no confusion, no possibility of failure. It feels like efficiency, but it's actually a trap that prevents us from developing the most important skill of all: figuring things out.

Think about the last time you tried to learn something new. Did you look for a tutorial that would walk you through every step, or did you start experimenting and look things up as you got stuck? If you're like most people, you chose the tutorial. And in doing so, you robbed yourself of the chance to develop real competence.

The Procedural Mindset Problem

Tutorials train us to be procedural followers rather than problem solvers. They teach us that every challenge has a predetermined sequence of steps, that someone else has already figured out the optimal path, that our job is execution rather than exploration.

This creates a fundamental mismatch between how tutorials work and how real skills develop. Real competence comes from wrestling with problems that don't have clear solutions, making decisions with incomplete information, and learning to recover from mistakes. Tutorials eliminate all of these crucial elements.

When you follow a tutorial, you're practicing following instructions, not solving problems. You might successfully reproduce the outcome, but you haven't developed the capacity to handle variations, unexpected obstacles, or novel situations. You've learned a procedure, not a skill.

The False Confidence Trap

Perhaps most insidiously, tutorials create false confidence. You complete the tutorial, achieve the intended result, and feel like you've mastered something. But try to do the same task without the tutorial, or with slightly different parameters, and you quickly discover how little you actually understand.

This false confidence is worse than honest ignorance because it prevents you from recognizing what you don't know. You think you can "do web design" because you followed a tutorial to build a portfolio site, but you can't actually design anything new. You think you understand investing because you followed steps to set up an index fund, but you can't evaluate different investment strategies.

The tutorial gave you the illusion of competence while preventing you from developing actual competence.

The Ambiguity Advantage

Here's what tutorials can't teach: how to operate in the messy middle where you don't know what step comes next. Real skill lives in the space between not knowing and figuring it out. It's built through encounters with uncertainty, not elimination of it.

When you start learning something without a tutorial, something magical happens: you develop what researchers call "tolerance for ambiguity." You learn to be comfortable not knowing the next step. You develop strategies for finding information, testing hypotheses, and iterating based on results.

This tolerance for ambiguity becomes a transferable skill. Once you learn to figure out one thing from first principles, you develop confidence that you can figure out other things too. You stop needing permission from tutorials to explore new domains.

The Documentation Solution

The alternative isn't to avoid all guidance—it's to use documentation instead of tutorials. Documentation tells you what's possible and how things work. Tutorials tell you exactly what to do and when to do it.

Good documentation provides reference material: here are the available tools, here's how they function, here are some examples of usage. It gives you the building blocks and lets you construct your own solutions. It respects your ability to make decisions about what you're trying to accomplish.

When you work from documentation instead of tutorials, you're forced to think about what you actually want to achieve and how the available tools might help you achieve it. You develop a mental model of how things work instead of just memorizing a sequence of actions.

Tuesday Morning Practice

Here's your challenge: the next time you want to learn something new, resist the urge to find a comprehensive tutorial. Instead, start with basic documentation and begin experimenting. When you get stuck, look up specific questions rather than finding someone else's complete solution path.

Yes, it will be slower at first. Yes, you'll feel uncertain and make mistakes. Yes, you'll sometimes go down dead ends. But you'll also develop something tutorials can never give you: the ability to figure things out independently.

Stop optimizing for the illusion of efficiency and start optimizing for actual capability. The goal isn't to follow steps perfectly—it's to develop the judgment to create your own steps.

The tutorial trap promises to eliminate uncertainty, but uncertainty is where real learning happens. Embrace the discomfort of not knowing what comes next. That's where actual skills are built.

The tutorial industrial complex has convinced us that uncertainty is inefficient, but uncertainty is where competence lives. The next time you're tempted to follow someone else's step-by-step plan, ask yourself: am I learning to solve problems or just learning to follow procedures? The difference matters more than you think.