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I get it, we need to save time. Why build something from scratch when there’s a (shitty) out-of-the-box option doing all the job for you.

By default, reinventing the wheel actually makes sense — not the other way around.

Let’s put together all the assumptions this saying takes (they’re easier to relate if you actually think of a wheel):

• There’s an elegant and simple solution for your problem.
• Taking this shortcut equals saving.
• You’ll waste others’ time.
• You’re overthinking it.
• It’s not worth touching what’s already in place.

And sometimes, in rare occasions, these are true and the wheel actually checks all the boxes. But here’s the hard truth: we only call something a problem when we don’t know there’s a solution for it — we wouldn’t say needing to cross a river is a problem if there’s already a bridge. We just walk the bridge, not even aware of the problem.

So whenever someone encounters a problem—it might affect just them or many, but it’s always experienced personally—it’s because they aren’t aware of the solution. They simply don’t know how to solve it yet. The “solution wheel” might be perfectly valid, might even seem sufficient, but the point is: it never occurred to them at first glance.

What happens if you actually jump into reinventing the wheel

Imagine you start creating your own solution—a wheel that’s been proven for centuries. You’re not just reusing something ready-made; you’re building it yourself, step by step. Tedious? Yes. Worth it? Absolutely, because you gain a deep understanding of the problem.

If you go down this path, you’ll likely fall into one of two groups:

• The naive: you haven’t yet grasped why shortcuts exist.
• The experienced: you understand the trade-off between saving time with existing solutions and the learning you get from doing it yourself.

Either way, you develop a real sense of the problem. Once solved, it won’t feel like a problem anymore—but you’ll also be able to transmit the foundations clearly, making the problem invisible to others.

At worst, reinventing the wheel forces knowledge to surface where it didn’t exist before, and you gain the ability to communicate it clearly. Because let’s be honest: the wheel—what already exists—is hard to explain in depth without turning it into a game of broken telephone along the way.

There’s more behind this idea. Those who wrestle with the internal debate—whether to test themselves and build their own solutions instead of recycling generic work—are actually in one of the final stages of learning. Those who aren’t, are doing anything but that.