You Have to Touch the Pan

The other day I sent my growth team a long list of books, threads, teardown links, the works.

But I added a caveat: Some of this stuff, you can’t fully learn it just by reading.

Things like:

It’s not that you can’t codify these. It’s just… hard. Taste, judgment, decision-making—they come from reps, not rules.

And even then, something’s still missing.

I’ve spoken to hundreds of founders. Told many “that won’t work.” Sometimes I’m wrong. But most times, they have to touch the pan to believe it.

You can warn someone the pan is hot. But until they touch it? They can’t feel it.

This is called tacit knowledge. The kind you can’t articulate well. The kind that needs to be felt to be understood. And when it does click—when the ad converts, or the test wins—that little dopamine hit That’s what burns it in.

Tacit knowledge is stuff you can’t fully explain. It’s not “how to run Facebook ads.” It’s “what it feels like when an ad is gonna perform.”

It’s why a designer can tell you a landing page is off, even if they can’t articulate the exact alignment issue. In The Tacit Dimension, Michael Polanyi declares, “I shall reconsider human knowledge by starting from the fact that we can know more than we can tell.”

Tacit knowledge is hard to teach because it’s felt, not just understood.

Here’s where it gets interesting. We learn faster when there’s an emotional charge.

Fear, pain, surprise, joy—these states boost retention. (Neuroscientist James McGaugh found that adrenaline during emotional events literally helps encode memories more deeply.) So when you feel something—like a win or a fail—you learn faster.

It’s why closing your first sale hits different. Why getting wrecked in a meeting burns a lesson into your brain. Why that first successful cold email is way more educational than a 2-hour workshop.

No stakes = no resonance = no growth.

You know what’s better than reading a landing page critique? Shipping a landing page. Watching it convert. Getting the Slack ping.

That’s dopamine. And dopamine isn’t just about “feeling good”—it’s a learning signal.

Your brain constantly measures prediction vs. outcome. If something goes better than expected, you get a spike. This is called “reward prediction error,” and it’s the engine of learning.

No spike? No lesson.

You have to design for resonance.

If you’re trying to learn something—growth, design, hiring, leadership—don’t just read about it. Don’t wait for the perfect conditions.

Touch the pan. Get burned. Get better.

That’s how the knowledge sticks.

Until next time,

Ajay

A few tools and collections I’ve built (or obsessively curated) over the years:

These are tools and services I use personally and professionally — and recommend without hesitation: