One of my favorite pieces of advice goes like this: “Bite off more than you can chew, and then figure out how to chew it.” 

I love it so much because it runs against almost everything we’re usually told. “Don’t bite off more than you can chew, be realistic, know your limits, don’t ego lift.”

And of course, there’s wisdom in that. 

But I’ve personally found that some of the most meaningful growth I’ve experienced in life came from doing the exact opposite. Taking on something slightly too big for you, something you’re not fully prepared for, and then slowly becoming the type of person that can handle it. 

My senior thesis was an amazing example of that for me. When I started, I had no clue how to code. I didn’t understand microbiome analysis, periodontal bone loss measurements, DADA2 pipelines, phyloseq objects, alpha and beta diversity, PERMANOVA, Bray-Curtis, Aitchison distances, ALDEx2, or linear mixed models. 

In other words, I had ABSOLUTELY bitten off more than I could chew and I sat in a library for 6 hours a day during my senior spring trying to piece it together. 

And somehow, I figured it out. I learned the methods, asked questions, made mistakes. I stared at code I didn’t understand until eventually everything clicked. And by the end, the project I once felt to be impossible became something I was proud of, and I even got an award for it. 

I think that is one of the strange truths of growth: you often don’t become capable before the challenge begins. You become capable because the challenge forces you to. 

So maybe the answer is not always to wait and prepare until you’re ready, but instead sometimes it can be to just take the biggest bite first, and then learn how to chew it.