This is an excellent essay. I remember sitting in my parents’ basement in high school with a fully assembled electronics board that I’d soldered together from a schematic, and no idea what to do about the fact that it didn’t work. Had I understood that learning how to build involved learning how to debug, I’d probably have built more things and fewer programs (for better or worse).

I must have known this about software and math, in order to be doing what I was doing in those areas then, but not figured out to generalize it to {electronics, mechanical objects, project plans, social interactions, habits and motivational systems, and creative writing} — and only partially to writing essays.