Those who power the web

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I loved Office ‘97. I thought it was the most intuitive application with straightforward usability. You can understand my surprised when I first saw that meme that made fun of the toolbar. It had hundreds of icons spanning a dozen lines, and shrank the writing space to only a couple of lines. That's not how it looked like on my computer. I had customized my toolbar to include only the icons I used the most, and memorized dozens of shortcuts.

I could do so because I didn't have the Internet. Not having Internet access forces us to find solutions, and that's what I did. I got a notebook, drew and documented every single icon. In a couple of months, Microsoft Office products had no secrets for me. At age 11, I helped the Embassy of Guinea properly format their official documents.

When I started learning to program, I didn't have Internet at home. I had to learn to read errors in my code and debug them myself.

But now that the Internet is so prevalent, we don't have to try as hard to learn anymore. If you don't know how to turn the text green in your editor, don't try to find the icon that does that. Instead, google "how to change text color in my editor". Your format is not pretty? Google "How to make my document pretty". Your computer is slow? Google "how to download more ram."

Now that it is easy to find information on the web, we no longer spend the time and energy to work our brain muscles. That's a mistake. Those who don't exercise their brains, only get by. But those who choose the hard path of learning, these are the people who create all the tutorials. They are the people who power the web.