The speaker spent two years hitting dead-ends to learn what doesn't work for them. True understanding requires direct experience, not secondhand knowledge. You can't skip the failure part.
Chapters
But of course, if you get to a certain point and have done the things that we've done and more, usually you have to go through, yeah, I did this and I failed. I also did this and I learned that, yo, that works, but it doesn't work for me, you know? And I would have loved to learn that didn't work for me by just someone telling me or vicariously being able to do it, but I actually had to do it and I just spent 2 years doing it. And I was winning it. So I had to literally get to the dead end before I realized that this isn't going to work. This isn't working for me.