Do you know how to do it? It is a question I have heard a lot throughout my career. It usually comes up when something unfamiliar is on the table-a new system, a new tool, a new problem-and someone is trying to decide whether progress is possible.

On the surface, it seems reasonable. It sounds like a practical way to reduce risk. But most of the time, that is not the actual question being asked. It is not really about whether someone has done that exact thing before. It is about whether they are capable of getting it done. Those are not the same thing, even though they are often treated as interchangeable.

Experience is not binary. Systems share patterns. Tools overlap. Languages rhyme. Once you have worked across enough technologies, learning something new becomes less about starting from zero and more about recognizing familiar ideas in a new form. You stop seeing tools as isolated skills and start seeing them as variations on concepts you already understand-data moving, systems communicating, failures needing to be handled, trade-offs needing to be made.

Listing tools or technologies can describe where someone has been, but it does not say much about how they think when they encounter something new. It does not capture how quickly they orient themselves, how they reason through unfamiliar territory, or how they make progress when there is not a clear path forward.

It also does not show how someone behaves when things do not work the way they expect. Whether they can read what is in front of them, understand what it is doing, validate assumptions, and adjust responsibly. Those skills tend to matter far more than whether a specific box can be checked.

With access to documentation, examples, and modern tooling including AI, the mechanics of learning have changed. You no longer need to memorize everything up front to be effective. What matters more is judgment: knowing what to trust, what to verify, what to change, and what the consequences might be. Learning has become less about recall and more about interpretation.

This does not mean experience no longer matters. In environments where mistakes carry real consequences, prior exposure is valuable. But in much of technical work, progress depends less on having seen something before and more on being able to navigate uncertainty without causing harm. That is a different kind of experience-one that is harder to quantify, but easier to recognize once you have worked with it.

The most effective people I have met do not end conversations with I do not know how to do that. That is where the conversation begins. They ask questions. Identify constraints. Figure out what they need access to. And then they work through it. Not recklessly, and not by guessing-but by breaking the problem down into things that can be understood and verified.

They are comfortable admitting what they do not know, but they do not treat that as a stopping point. They treat it as part of the process. Over time, that approach compounds. It builds trust, reduces friction, and makes unfamiliar work feel manageable.

There is an important difference between not knowing how to do something and not being able to do it. The more meaningful question is often the one that comes next: can they figure it out and follow through?