Often when we are faced with a new concept or a completely new idea, we decide “this is not for me”. We hate floundering with something new. Why suffer when you already know so many existing things so well?

Most of our learning comes from things that are initially unfamiliar to us. Familiarity breeds complacency. The unfamiliar excites and motivates us to learn beyond our boundaries. This is where we grow.

As John De Goes puts it:

I first came across this concept while learning React.js. Given the proliferation of Javascript frameworks recently, why would you learn React over Angular or Ember or any other framework? Knowing how unfamiliar React is to newcommers, the team prepares us thus:

React challenges a lot of conventional wisdom, and at first glance some of the ideas may seem crazy. Give it five minutes while reading this guide; those crazy ideas have worked for building thousands of components both inside and outside of Facebook and Instagram.

And true enough I found some of the ideas crazy - at least initially. But after heeding their advice, I suspended my cynicism and proceeded to learn a rather nifty framework.

The React guys borrowed this idea from Give it Five Minutes by Jason Fried. In it he says:

Dismissing an idea is so easy because it doesn’t involve any work. You can scoff at it. You can ignore it. You can puff some smoke at it. That’s easy. The hard thing to do is protect it, think about it, let it marinate, explore it, riff on it, and try it. The right idea could start out life as the wrong idea.

So the next time you see something unfamiliar or “crazy”, suspend your disbelief and give it a go. The results may surprise you.