I’m writing this from Ubud, after spending six days in Nusa Lembongan, a small island off the coast of Bali, where a week ago I didn’t know how to scuba dive and today I have my PADI Open Water certification. The certificate itself isn’t what matters, though: what matters is what changed in the process of getting it, the way learning new skills that push you outside your comfort zone does something fundamental to how you see yourself and what you think is possible.

What held me back before

I’ve thought about learning to scuba dive for years because the idea always fascinated me, rooted in my relationship with water that started when swimming was my sport growing up. I competed on a swim team, spent hours in the pool every day, loved being in water (and still do), but there was always this fundamental limitation: your breath, the way that no matter how good you get at swimming, eventually you have to surface because you’re constrained by your lung capacity. Scuba diving removes that constraint entirely, letting you stay down, explore, and move through the water without the clock of your breath counting down, and that possibility always appealed to me, even though I never committed to actually learning it.

Then I started dating Julia, who’s an Advanced Open Water diver who has dived around the world, and hearing her experiences when we got together made the fascination grow because these weren’t abstract possibilities anymore, but real places she’d been, real creatures she’d seen, real experiences I could have too. I initially thought about getting certified in Barcelona, where it would be close to home and familiar, but talking with Julia made me reconsider, since the sea life would be more beautiful somewhere tropical, and Indonesia is known for strong currents, so learning somewhere with changing conditions from the start might make me a better diver rather than optimizing for comfort.

But there was still resistance, the kind that’s harder to name, because learning something new means being a beginner again and being a beginner means performing in front of others: an instructor watching you struggle with skills that are probably second nature to them, other divers who already know what they’re doing, that discomfort of being incompetent while people watch that you have to embrace if you want to learn anything worth learning.

The decision to start

This trip to Bali was planned as a diving trip from the start, where Julia was going to dive and I came with the intention to finally learn, though what made it real wasn’t just the decision I’d made before we left but booking the course itself, committing to those specific days and putting myself in the position where backing out would mean wasting the opportunity I’d created for myself.

The first day was pool training, what they call confined water, where you learn the basics in a controlled environment before going into the ocean, and I thought being comfortable in water from years of swimming would make this easy, but it didn’t because breathing underwater through a regulator is completely different from anything swimming teaches you.

Every swimming instinct says hold your breath when your face goes under, and empty your lungs and refill them again with every stroke, but the regulator keeps feeding you air and your nervous system has to unlearn what it knows and trust something new, where breathing needs to be slow, controlled, and not explosive. This is what took most time to learn properly over the course of the week.

But what surprised me was how systematic the training was, with each skill broken down into small steps followed by clear demonstrations and practice until competence, before moving to the next skill, reminding me of how good software engineering training works too, where you don’t try to learn everything at once but master one piece and then build on it.

The moments that shifted everything

The second and third days, we went into the ocean for real diving, descending to 12 meters and then 18 meters over the course of four dives, and this is where the breakthrough moments happened. The first ocean dive was disorienting because while the pool had clear water, a flat bottom, and controlled conditions, the ocean has currents and limited visibility and fish everywhere and a reef below you that’s constantly changing depth, so my brain was processing so much new information that I could barely remember the skills we’d practiced since I was too busy trying to take it all in.

But by the second dive that day something clicked as my buoyancy control got better and I stopped fighting the water and started moving with it, where years of swimming gave me something useful in the form of comfort with being weightless and letting the water hold you, though diving added a new dimension since in swimming you’re always moving toward the surface or parallel to it while in diving you’re suspended in three dimensions where you can hover in place and move up, down, forward, backward. That freedom took getting used to, but once it started to feel natural, the mental space that had been consumed by “am I doing this right?” started opening up, and I could actually look around, notice the coral, watch the fish, be present in the experience instead of just surviving it.

The third dive was when it really came together, where we descended to 18 meters and I felt calm and comfortable with steady breathing and controlled movements, no longer thinking about every micro-adjustment because the skills had started becoming automatic, and in that space I could actually enjoy being underwater with its weightlessness and silence and this completely alien environment that somehow felt peaceful. That progression from overwhelm to competence to enjoyment happened in about six hours of diving, which is what struck me: how quickly you can go from “I have no idea what I’m doing” to “I can actually do this” when the learning is structured well and you’re fully immersed in it.

What learning to learn actually looks like

Tim Ferriss talks a lot about meta-learning, the skill of learning how to learn by breaking down complex skills into components and finding the minimum effective dose of practice and identifying what actually matters versus what’s just noise, and scuba diving gave me a direct experience of those principles in action though what made it work wasn’t just the formal instruction but the conversations between dives.

Julia and I would talk through what I’d just experienced, questions like how do you build intuition around buoyancy and how do you know when it feels right after you’ve adjusted your BCD at depth, where she’d explain and I’d ask more questions about how you breathe, whether it’s through the diaphragm or more shallow lung breaths, and I even put my hand on her chest to feel the rhythm of it. Those conversations filled in what the instructor couldn’t convey in a demonstration, because while the course taught me the essential skills like buoyancy control, equalization, and emergency procedures and communication underwater, with each skill practiced deliberately until it became reliable, understanding how to make those skills feel effortless came from debriefing with someone who’d already internalized them to the point of not needing to think about them.

What I learned was that efficiency underwater comes from doing less: stay neutral in the water, don’t kick your fins too hard, don’t breathe so hard, and if it’s a drift dive, just relax and let the current take you forward. Each dive got longer because my oxygen consumption improved, not from trying harder but from being mindful of all the small things that waste energy, and the feedback loop was immediate where you try something, feel how it works, talk through what happened, adjust, and try again. The water doesn’t lie because you can feel when your buoyancy is off, and you can see when you’re using too much air because you’re working too hard, so the environment gives you constant information while the conversations help you interpret that information and know what to change.

That’s the meta-skill: recognizing that learning happens in layers, where formal instruction gives you the framework and practice gives you experience, but conversation with someone who’s already done it helps you build intuition faster by compressing the learning curve through understanding not just what to do but how it should feel when you’re doing it right.

What learning from zero unlocks

I’m sitting here with my PADI certification, but what I’m noticing isn’t about self-improvement being a new concept to me. I’ve always been focused on getting better at things. What’s new is remembering what it feels like to learn something from absolute zero, to have no existing skill to build on, and to start as a complete beginner.

I’ve spent years sharpening existing skills like getting better at engineering leadership and improving how I communicate and refining my productivity systems, and all of that is important, but it’s iterative improvement on things I already know how to do. Learning to dive was different because I had no foundation here beyond swimming, helping with water comfort, while diving itself was completely new, and experiencing that arc from zero to competent in four days cracked something open.

If I can learn something from scratch like this then I can also keep sharpening the skills I already have, where the confidence works in both directions because learning from zero proves you can still build new capabilities and that proof makes you trust that your existing capabilities can keep growing too. This connects to something I wrote about a couple weeks ago about the gap between taste and skill, where your ability to recognize good work develops faster than your ability to create it and that gap is brutal when you’re learning because you can hear exactly what’s wrong before you know how to fix it.

Diving replicated that experience because I could feel when my buoyancy was off before I knew how to correct it and I could see I was using too much air before I understood how to breathe more efficiently, where the gap between what I could perceive and what I could execute was right there, immediate, undeniable. But the gap closed fast because the feedback was so direct, and watching it close reminded me that this is how all learning works, that the gap is supposed to be there and it’s not a sign you’re failing but the training ground itself. What cracked open wasn’t just “I can learn new things” but “I remember how this feels”.

The discomfort, the incompetence, the gradual closing of the gap, and remembering that feeling is what makes everything else feel more possible again.

Why starting from zero matters

When you spend years working on iterative improvement you can forget what building from scratch feels like, where you optimize what you already know and get incrementally better at existing skills, which is valuable but also limiting because starting from zero reminds you that competence is buildable and you’re not just refining what you can already do but proving you can acquire completely new capabilities, and that proof changes what feels possible.

I’m leaving Nusa Lembongan with a PADI certification, but what matters more is remembering that learning from zero is still available to me, that the skills I have aren’t the only skills I can have and the things I’m good at aren’t the only things I can get good at. And that reminder ripples everywhere because if I can learn to dive then I can also keep sharpening the skills I already have, where the confidence isn’t just about acquiring something new but about trusting the process of improvement itself, whether you’re starting from zero or building on years of experience.

That’s what adventure unlocks: not transformation or reinvention but just the reminder that growth is renewable, that curiosity can take you places you haven’t been, that being a beginner at something even for a few days cracks open possibilities you’d forgotten were there.