Reinvent the Wheel
Don't reinvent the wheel they said. Bullshit. Build your own anyway. Just do it.
- #learning
How it started
I bought into “don’t reinvent the wheel” for years. Hard. Every time I had an idea, that voice kicked in: someone already built this, you’re wasting time. So I didn’t build anything. I didn’t learn anything either, because learning meant building and building felt pointless if the thing already existed. The advice sounds smart.
“Use the existing library.” “Don’t waste time on what’s already solved.” Everyone says it. It became the default answer to any ambitious idea. I never questioned it.
Then I noticed
At some point I realized: the world is full of reinvented wheels that are slightly better.
McDonald’s came after KFC. Pepsi came after Coke. The iPhone wasn’t the first phone. Every successful thing is a reinvention of something that already existed. Nobody looked at KFC and said “well, fried chicken is solved, pack it up.” And at work? Every company rebuilds Notion or Slack internally. Every project is yet another CRUD slop.
“Don’t reinvent the wheel” sounds like wisdom but it’s actually a creativity killer dressed up as pragmatism.
You don’t learn from using something. You learn from building it. From hitting the wall at 2am. From making the wrong choice first and understanding why it’s wrong. From owning every decision in the codebase.
Reading docs is not understanding. Following a tutorial is not understanding. Understanding comes from struggling. The advice doesn’t save time. It steals the part of the process where you actually grow.
What I know now
Reinventing the wheel is how you learn. It’s how things get better. It’s how you make something that’s yours.
Not every reinvention needs to be better than the original. Build that Flappy Bird clone nobody will play. Build that Netflix clone nobody will use. Build that library that solves a problem you already have a library for.
The wheel might be round. But yours will roll the way you want it to.
So yeah keep reinvent the wheel. Build the thing that exists. Break it. Fix it. Learn from it. Don’t let “it already exists” stop you from building yours.