41The first one has to be small

I'll push on this one, because it's where most people break.

Your first project should take an evening or a weekend. Not a month. Not "it's big but it's real". Small.

The reason isn't that you can't handle something big. With AI you might. The reason is that you need to walk the whole path end to end as fast as possible: from idea to a thing living on the internet at its own address. That path contains a dozen small ambushes - domains, deploys, "why has everything collapsed on mobile". Walking them on a small project takes a day. On a big one it takes a month of despair.

After the first small one you have a map in your head. You know what the road is made of. And that's when a big project stops being frightening.

A sign you've got the size right: you can describe it in one sentence, and that sentence has no "and" in it. "A single-page site for my cat" - good. "A social network for cats with chat, a feed and a shop" - no.