When you’re playing a sport, there’s a moment when knowing how to do something tips over into knowing. It’s the moment that theoretical knowledge becomes your body’s instinctive reaction. The phenomenon, it turns out, is not just true for sports.

But first, let’s back up.

One of the main things I remember from 190H last semester was everyone, from Dr. Armstrong to alumni, telling us to try things, to pursue our ideas further. As a chemical engineer who didn’t have a particularly strong interest in startups, it never seemed that relevant to me. 90% of all startups fail, and I average six hours of sleep a night on good weeks – trying to turn one of our projects into a business wasn’t really on my radar. But, at the end of May, two of my teammates, Ben Graney Green and Sarina Haryanto, also from Cohort 26, and I were trying to do exactly that.

As Ben put it, “It was a ‘why not?’ type of mentality at the beginning.” Our bits-based project’s swimming app was a solid idea, the semester was over, and we’d gotten encouragement and advice on how to move forward; what was the worst that could happen?

This is where the sports metaphor comes back in: between the three of us, we had a fair amount of academic knowledge, but not a lot practice applying it. It’s easy to say, “Good communication is important.” It’s a lot harder to communicate effectively when you’re working full time and geographically spread out. “And it was hard to go from working to the creativity you need in design,” Ben said. We knew we needed to understand and empathize with our audience, but getting the information you need out of strangers is a lot harder than it looks. It turns out, talking common sense is easy; doing it takes a bit more practice. However, “I enjoyed… exploring ideas and interviewing people without feeling rushed to meet a deadline,” Sarina said.

Which brings me to the most valuable thing we learned this summer: if you have the time and the chance, always try turning your ideas into actual businesses. It doesn’t matter if it’s not quite a perfect idea or if you have no idea what an angel investor is. You learn more by doing it for real than you ever will by reading it from a book. Ben summed it up nicely, “Suddenly it’s about a whole multifaceted company… It’s a very different environment [from class].”

None of us are millionaires after our experience this summer, and our project’s tabled for the semester until we all have more time to commit to it. But we got the chance to get our hands dirty, to know something instead of just reading about it, and it didn’t require tuition or hundreds of dollars in textbooks. It was just a decision to go big instead of going home – and that’s a choice anyone can make.