Why I (L)earn
The credentials were only a means to an end: comprehension.
I did not learn in search of a grade. I did not learn for applause, nor for the letters appended to a name. I learned to move, to operate, to debug, to sustain. I learned so that when I lifted the hood — whether of an engine or an economy — I would know what I was looking at.
The classroom was a staging ground, but the moment I began paying for my own tuition — through fuel, hosting, and downtime — the syllabus changed. Education became laborious. Labor became instruction. There were no certificates for torque specs, no honor rolls for miles driven with bolts torqued to spec, no GPA for isolating IP conflicts or propagating DNS records. Yet these became my metrics. These were the rubrics I wrote and rewrote, day after day.
Learning was no longer preparation. Learning became the act itself.
I. The Curriculum Under the Hood
I learned in ratios — coolant to water, oil to filter, time to torque. The torque wrench didn’t lie, and it didn’t grade on a curve. Either the part was seated, or it wasn’t. Assignments arrived as knocks under the frame. Exams took place at highway speeds. The Escape wasn’t metaphor — it was material. A chassis for both movement and meaning. Every roadside repair became a pop quiz. Every cargo haul, a term paper.
II. The Web as Workshop
Where there had once been footnotes, there were now fragments of code. Each deployment was a submission. Each 404, a critique. Each click tracked through GTAG, a silent seminar in user behavior. I didn’t write essays anymore — I deployed pages. I didn’t submit drafts — I served content.
Infrastructure was no longer invisible. It was something I could build, host, route, and reroute. DNS, PHP, HTML, HTTP — these became my disciplines. And each line of code was a footnote in a broader theory of independence.
III. Labor as Instruction
This was never a rejection of learning — it was its realization. I learned through labor. Through errors thrown, through bearings worn. Through cash flow models, maintenance routines, mileage logs, and delivery routes that arced like syntax across a map.
There’s no professor to assign me readings anymore. The roads did. The projects wrote themselves. All I had to do was follow through.
IV. From Dolphins to Documents
When I served, qualification meant earning my dolphins. Not a medal, not a ribbon — a pin that marked my integration into the system. Earning one’s dolphins wasn’t about memorization. It was about comprehension, confirmed through application. I had to know the entire boat: every valve, every protocol, every emergency. Not to pass a test — but to keep it alive. The submarine wasn’t forgiving of misunderstanding.
Later, I found myself doing something similar, but above ground. I incorporated a company — not to chase profit, but to contain my curiosity. To give it boundaries. To route it legally, operationally, financially. I treated the LLC like I treated the boat: as something I had to learn end-to-end. Not just the form filings and EIN registration, but the torque on the axle, the thermals on the MacBook, and the logic behind the landing page.
The company was never the end goal. It was the hull. What mattered was my capacity to operate within it’s confines.
V. Comprehension as Command
There was no prize for understanding, except command. And command was reward enough: to command my schedule, my axle, my name. Not to be told what to do, but to ask what must be done — and to do it.
I did not learn for credit. I learned for comprehension. And comprehension is what made me operational.
This is why I (L)earn.