# The Start Date Everyone Gets Wrong



Ask me when I started and I used to say August 2025, the month Samuel pointed me toward React and Next.js. That answer is wrong. 



*By Ryan Lim · 11 September 2026 · 3 min read · [Web version](https://www.ryanlim.sg/papers/the-start-date-everyone-gets-wrong)*



![The Start Date Everyone Gets Wrong](https://presso-app.s3.ap-southeast-1.amazonaws.com/presso/projects/xGqskPhWNXYestZoW/1789217958861.jpg)



The real start date is June 2025, around 2 months earlier, and nobody was teaching me to code that summer. Samuel is my uncle, and my mom had arranged weekly meetings with him to talk about AI with the family. That's it. No curriculum, no assignments, no goal beyond understanding what this technology actually was.

Most people treat "getting interested in something" and "starting to train in it" as the same event. They aren't. Confusing the two is why some people wait for a course to enroll in before they let themselves care about a subject. It's also why others burn out fast. They mistake a spark of curiosity for readiness to commit, then quit the first time the material gets hard.

> A family sitting down to talk about AI is a different kind of learning than a course, and it did something a course can't.

Those June and July sessions weren't built to produce a skill. They were built to produce understanding: what AI actually does, where it's heading, why it mattered enough for my mother to set aside a recurring slot for it. Nobody was testing me or ranking me against other students. That absence of pressure is what let curiosity grow on its own. I wasn't trying to impress anyone in those meetings. I was just trying to understand something new, at a pace that matched real interest rather than a deadline.

> The year between interest and training wasn't wasted time. It was the part where the interest got tested.

Real interest survives a gap. Manufactured interest, the kind that comes from thinking a skill sounds impressive or lucrative, fades as soon as nothing is pushing you. Between July 2024 and August 2025, nobody was pushing me to code. If the interest had been shallow, it would have faded once the novelty of the family meetings wore off. It didn't. By the time Samuel actually put me onto a specific training path (React, Next.js, using AI as a tool rather than a crutch) the interest wasn't a fresh reaction to a cool conversation. It had already survived a year of nothing forcing it to stay alive.

> Where interest gets sparked matters as much as how it gets trained.

I didn't discover AI through a bootcamp ad or a viral tweet. I discovered it because someone in my life decided it was worth a recurring family conversation, and because someone with real expertise was willing to have that conversation with a teenager who had no technical background yet. That's a specific kind of privilege, and I don't think it happens the same way without it. The training that came a year later, the part that looks like the "real" starting point from the outside, only worked because the groundwork had already been laid in a living room, not a classroom.

If you're trying to pin down when something really started for you, don't look for the day you signed up for a course. Look for the first time someone made the subject make sense to you without asking anything back. That's the real beginning. Everything after it is just doing the work.