Yesterday, my wife and I took delivery of our first Tesla vehicle - a Long Range Model Y. We initially placed our order nearly eleven months ago, last February. We knew it was going to take a long time to get it, but the time was certainly longer than we had expected. Regardless, after only having it for a day at this point, we are both in love with it.

Now, I'm not a reviewer. You are not about to read another review that gushes about how amazing Tesla vehicles are, all the features, etc. In fact, I don't want to talk about the car at all. I love it so far, and it is a joy to drive, but I want to talk about how the car got me thinking within the first 24 hours of driving it.

Or rather, learning to drive it.

Sometimes, you are going to feel stupid

As you may or not be aware, Tesla vehicles have an interior that is considered somewhat radical by today's standards. There are almost no physical controls in the car. Door and window controls, yes. But stereo? No. Wipers? No. Side mirror adjustments? No. Climate control? Vents you can adjust? A dashboard with gauges? No, no, and no.

Nearly everything in a Tesla vehicle is controlled by software, from the main screen that sits in the front center of the vehicle. On paper, this makes a lot of sense. It does not prepare you, however, for how clueless you are going to feel when you first get behind the wheel of one of these vehicles - even when you know what you are getting yourself into.

I consider myself technologically savvy - I work in software development and have deployed a home media server. I even went as far as purchasing a server rack that I could mount all my networking hardware, which is admittedly a bit over the top for your average home user.

All of that considered, I figured picking up a vehicle this technologically focused would not be a problem. However, when I got behind the steering wheel for the first time it was a jarring transition.

I felt like an idiot. And part of me immediately hated the car for making me feel like an idiot.

Why don't our minds like to change?

When we learn something new for the first time we always have to start from square one. If you are new to software development and programming, you generally go into it knowing that you don't know anything. You expect to feel 'stupid' at first because you know that you don't know that much about a new topic.

Your mindset changes, however, once you think you know about something. Going back to the example of my new car. I have been driving for many years. I know how to operate a vehicle. But when I was faced with a vehicle that worked completely differently from the inside out, my mind subconsciously treated it as hostile.

You've probably heard (or spoken) some of the phrases before: "What was wrong with the old way?" "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!" "This is way too complicated!" Our minds seem to naturally resist any kind of change to knowledge that we think we already have.

Even with all of this in mind, and knowing what I was getting myself into with the Tesla, I still felt the resistance of my mind to learning something new. Even though I was excited about it!

Learning new things is hard

Once you become knowledgeable about something, it can be easy to forget how hard it was when you were first learning. I remember when I was only a few years into my web development career when I first started learning about asynchronous programming - when code no longer executes sequentially. This is how internet browsers send data and also the basis of multi-threaded programs. It can be mind-bending to understand at times.

Several years later, while I don't claim to be a master of it by any stretch of the imagination, I understand how it works. I know several ways to write code that will execute smoothly in an asynchronous environment. Now that I have a better understanding, it is hard to remember how confusing it was at first.

You are likely to encounter some kind of resistance anytime to try to learn something new. Learning can be filled with a lot of uncertainty. You are entering uncharted territory. Stepping into the unknown. You don't know how it is going to turn out. Your mind is going to tell you that this is too hard or that your time is probably better spent doing something easier.

New is not bad

I said that this was not going to be a review of Tesla, and that is still my plan. But they are doing things that nobody has ever done before. And they seem to be doing incredibly well at it. Yes, there have been many bumps in the road that have played out on the world stage, and there will likely be more. However, as a company they are forging ahead, trying new things as they go.

Just using their cars as an example, they have dramatically reduced the number of parts on their vehicles. This makes them easier to build, and cheaper to maintain than other vehicles, just to one example.

With the recently announced Tesla Semi, there were detractors everywhere online saying things like "it makes no sense" or "the Tesla semi design defies physics". Yet they just announced it last December and are already delivering a fleet to their first customer.

Just because something is unfamiliar does not automatically make it bad. in fact, it is quite possible that what you are looking at or working with or learning about could be superior to what you already know. Often times once we get used to something new and it becomes intuitive, we then change our minds and think how terrible the 'old way' of doing something was.

Learning for Life

The same goes for me and my new car. I've since overcome the initial resistance of learning to operate a car from a touch screen. In fact, it's become fun now. I still don't know off the top of my head where to find everything. (It took me several minutes to figure out how to adjust the side mirrors the first time.) but now that I'm starting to get the hang of it, it gets more and more exciting the more I learn.

The same also goes for you and me in life. We will never be done learning unless we decide to be. There is so much to learn about; it hurts me to see people not do anything with their lives besides the regular 9-5 followed by an evening in front of the TV. If you want to make something of yourself, go and learn about stuff! It's going to be hard and, like me, your mind will resist you at times from doing things that you know are going to be good for you to learn or do.

The trick is to push past it and do the thing anyway. Learn that new skill. Take on additional responsibilities at work without extra pay because you will learn something new. Spend some time each night practicing an instrument. Pick up a new hobby. Time spent learning is never wasted.

There does not always have to be an end goal to learning something new. Go and try learning something just for the sake of learning.

Learn to enjoy the learning process. Embrace it.