Perpetual Learning can be viewed as a blessing or a curse. Learning something new can be painful, especially when it is done under pressure and with little guidance. Yet, like the athlete who must endure muscle soreness after strenuous workouts, the software developer endures the mental dissonance that comes with learning something new. That dissonance can become a welcome sign of progress. Self-reflection, identifying failure through feedback loops, and learning your weaknesses all appear negative on the surface, but these patterns are helping you to reduce your ignorance. The alternative is to focus exclusively on what you already know, but this is not the way toward mastering software craftsmanship; it is the way to specialization in a single expertise. Phillip Armour, in his paper “The Five Orders of Ignorance,” focuses on the roles of ignorance and knowledge in software development: