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When I was a teenager and wanted to learn to drive, my mom just told me: “Before learning to drive, you must know how to change a tire.”
To clearly explain how I felt with this comment, I’ll ask you something: Have you seen The Karate Kid movies? Particularly the first one, where Daniel is being trained by Mr. Miyagi and the latter asks him to polish cars—“wax on… wax off”? So maybe this was not just a lesson for driving, but a lesson for life.
I wasn’t in the mood to find out, but I still thought about it. Maybe it was some kind of initiation my mom was planning. Maybe she just wanted to delay the inevitable burden of having a teenager wanting to drive everywhere at any time. Maybe she didn’t want me to use her car (and I definitely couldn’t afford one) or maybe it was, as I said, a life lesson.
Before I tell you whether it really was, I’ll share a story—just for fun, and to complement the main storyline.
By then, it was common to receive scam phone calls claiming you’d won a prize—if only you deposited money into an account. So, my mom didn’t flinch and she hung up the phone.
I asked her, “Who was it?”
She replied, “I don’t know, someone saying I had won a car… but I didn’t fall for that scam”
There was a pause… until my mom remembered a ticket she had bought to help her boss. Could it be related? Was it a legit call, and she just rejected a real prize?
In those days, we didn’t have caller ID, so there was no way to call back. The only chance was to find the newspaper where the results were published—yes, lottery results, movie schedules, and TV guides all were published in the newspaper.
So off we went, and to our surprise, my mom had a winning ticket for a brand-new, compact car. The call wasn’t a scam after all. Fortunately they called back a few days later, and she was able to claim her prize.
So—with two cars at home—let’s return to the main storyline.
Having two cars and only one driver opened the door to expedite my driving lessons. But of course, the original requirement still stood: I had to learn to change a tire.
I won’t bore you with the technicalities of changing a tire or learning to drive. It was a great experience, and my mom was very patient with me (driving a stick shift is a challenge on its own). Oh—and knowing how to change a tire came in handy when I had to drive six hours home from college in the summer. But I will leave those stories for another post.
Years later, I finally understood why I needed to learn to change a tire—or at least I developed my own interpretation. And yes, it turns out it was a life lesson. Just like “wax on… wax off.”
Changing a tire, along with checking the oil, gas, and brake fluid levels, isn’t essential for driving. You can go from point A to point B without knowing any of it. But having that basic knowledge helps you take better care of the car, avoid dangerous situations, and even fix an issue when it happens.
The same is true in other fields. You don’t need to understand how to solve differential equations before using a calculator—but doing so can help you better understand the results it provides (and confirm they’re right).
Think about Gen-AI.
You might think, “I don’t want to deal with training or customizing models; I just want to write prompts”. It may be a good approach.
But the more you understand Gen-AI concepts beyond their application, the more perspective—and maybe competitive advantage—you’ll have in today’s IT world.
In the end, it’s not just about the task—it’s about understanding what supports it.