She Was Right, I Wouldn't Have Won

In 1996 there was a flyer on a wall about a programming competition.

I read it about four times walking past it. I was already teaching myself to program at home on a machine that wasn’t connected to anything, out of a help file and whatever books I could get, and here was a piece of paper saying there were other people doing this and they were all going to be in one room.

I went and told my teacher I wanted to enter.

She laughed.

Why Would You Ever Think That

The actual question was “why bother, you can’t win.”

Then, in case that hadn’t landed, “why would you ever think that you could go into that?”

I remember standing there doing the arithmetic on it. Not the emotional arithmetic, I did that later. The literal one. Trying to work out what she’d seen that I hadn’t, what the criteria were that I had so obviously failed, whether there was something everyone else in the room knew about me.

There wasn’t. She just thought it was funny.

She Was Right

Here’s the part I have to be honest about, because the story is worthless without it.

I wouldn’t have won.

I was a kid writing QBasic in a bedroom with no internet. I had no idea what an algorithm was. I’d never seen anyone else’s code in my life. Whoever was going to win that competition had a head start on me measured in years, and probably a parent or a teacher who actually knew something.

If the question was “will this boy win the competition”, her answer was correct. She’d have been correct if she’d said it kindly. She’d have been correct if she’d said it in writing, with numbers.

Being right about that costs nothing and proves nothing. It’s like being right that a beginner won’t win their first race.

The Question She Answered Wasn’t The Question

Because “can you win” was never the reason to go.

Nobody enters their first anything to win it. You enter to find out what the thing actually is. What the problems look like when someone else writes them. How fast other people are. Whether the way you’ve been doing it in your bedroom is normal or insane. Where you sit, honestly, when you’re not the only data point you have.

She answered “will you win”, which was a fair question with a correct answer. The real question was “what happens to this kid if he tries”, and she never asked it.

That’s the whole failure, and it’s a really common one. People assess the odds of the outcome and treat that as an assessment of the attempt. They’re not the same calculation and they don’t even have the same inputs.

The Maths Nobody Does

Work out what entering would have cost me.

A Saturday. Some nerves. Coming last in a room full of strangers I would never see again.

That’s it. That’s the downside in full. Losing a programming competition at fourteen has no consequences whatsoever. It does not go on a record. It does not follow you. There is no scenario where it comes up again.

And the upside was every single thing I listed above, plus the possibility, however remote she found it, of not coming last.

That’s an absurdly good trade and she talked me out of it in under ten seconds, because she’d priced the attempt at the value of the prize.

Most people do this. Most people are still doing it right now, about a job application, a first talk, a side project, a business. They’re asking “will I win” and quietly deciding not to enter, when the actual cost of entering and losing is a Saturday.

It Did Light A Fire

Now the uncomfortable bit.

It worked on me. Not the way she intended, but it worked.

I went home angry and I kept going. That laugh sat in the back of my head for years, and every time something got hard enough that stopping looked reasonable, it was there. I don’t think I’d have described it as motivation at the time. It felt more like a splinter.

And I know how that reads. Harsh teacher, kid proves them wrong, everyone learns a lesson about grit.

I don’t want to write that post, because I don’t believe it.

Being told you can’t do something is a terrible teaching method that happens to work on a certain kind of person.

I was that kind of person, mostly by luck. I already had the thing at home. I was already programming for my own reasons, and nothing she said made the computer in my bedroom less interesting. The fire had fuel because there was already a fire.

Plenty of kids in that same corridor didn’t have that. For them, an adult laughing at the idea is just the end of it. They don’t go home and get angry, they go home and quietly stop mentioning it. I’ve met adults in their forties who can still name the exact person who made them stop.

Discouragement doesn’t sort people by talent. It sorts them by how much they’d already committed before anyone told them not to.

So no, it wasn’t a favour. I got something out of it because I was already too far in to take the advice, and that’s not the same as it being good advice.

Twenty Years Is Not A Moment

If you’re waiting for the part where I go back and show her, there isn’t one.

That’s the thing about proving someone wrong. In your head it’s a scene. In practice it’s twenty-something years of turning up, and by the time you’ve unambiguously done it you’ve long stopped caring, and the person doesn’t remember saying it. She almost certainly has no memory of that conversation. It was ten seconds of her Tuesday.

What actually happened was much less dramatic. I kept building things. Most of them were bad. Then some of them were less bad. Then people started paying for them, and then bigger people started paying for them, and at some point I looked up and it had been my entire adult working life.

Two decades of writing software. Systems that have handled tens of millions of dollars. Tools that have been used by more people in a day than went to my school. Not because I was the winner of anything, because I didn’t stop.

Nobody hands you a certificate for that. It just accumulates.

What Actually Got Me Here

I want to be really clear about this, because it’s the useful part.

It wasn’t a head start, because I didn’t have one. No family in the industry, no mentor, no school that taught it properly, no machine in the house that could even talk to another machine. Everything I know now was built after that conversation, not before it.

It was turning up. It was building the thing badly, finding out why it was bad, and building it again. It was being self-taught, which meant being wrong constantly and having no one to blame for it. It was staying interested for long enough that time did the work.

The advantage compounds and nobody can see it happening, including you. There’s no day where you become a developer. There’s just a very long series of days where you didn’t stop being one.

That is completely available to anyone. It’s not a gift. It’s just unglamorous and slow, which is why it looks like talent from the outside.

If Someone Has Told You That

Then here’s what I’d actually say to you, since I never got told it.

They might be right about the outcome. Genuinely, they might. You might not win, you might not get that job, the first version of your thing might be embarrassing. Take that seriously, because pretending otherwise doesn’t help you.

It changes nothing about whether to enter.

Work out what it actually costs you to try, in real units. A weekend. An email that gets ignored. Being the worst person in a room for a day. Then work out what it costs you to keep wondering. In my experience the second number is always bigger, and it’s the one nobody puts on the whiteboard.

And be careful whose assessment you’re carrying around. The people who tell you what you can’t do are usually estimating from a very small amount of information, in about ten seconds, on a Tuesday, and then they go to lunch and forget. You’re the one who keeps it for twenty years.

Don’t give a ten second opinion that much of your life.

The Flyer

I still think about that flyer occasionally. Not the teacher so much, the paper.

Somebody put it on the wall specifically so that kids who were interested would see it and turn up. It did its job. I saw it, I was interested, I went and told an adult.

That’s the whole system working right up until the last step.

So if you’re the adult in that conversation, and someone comes to you with a flyer, the only correct response is “go on then.”

They probably won’t win. Let them lose.

John Croucher builds practical software and AI systems for Australian businesses, focused on solving real problems with measurable outcomes.