There’s a wide range of tasks that most people get why they’re hard. And then there are activities where I think a lot of people might think to themselves “what’s so hard about that?”

On the one end of the continuum, you can have a visceral sense of the difficulty of a given task. On the other, you’ve never even given any thought.

Things that people appreciate are hard: playing basketball well, solving math puzzles, drawing lifelike pictures, memorizing human anatomy. The commonality here, I think, is that these are the kinds of activities that most people have some experience with. A typical school experience will have you try these all out and you will find that throwing a ball with exactly the right force in exactly the right direction is tricky.

Even something that is pretty foreign to people, let’s say “rocket science”, might feel hard because people know it involves physics and math, and they’ve tried doing some physics and math.

In contrast, there are tasks that, not having tried them, people don’t feel like that should be that hard. That includes me. Until I fired a gun for the first time, I did not appreciate the challenge. I’d heard it said it was hard but not understood. I’d played many a video game and there you aim and fire. Aiming is a little tricky, especially to do fast, but it didn’t seem that hard. I had no sense of actual recoil, of grip mattering, of stance mattering. Just once session, and I could see what it was that people were mastering. Just how many experiences are like this? What’s hard about repairing drywall? What’s hard about parenting? What’s hard about…you name it. Probably something!

While writing this, I turned to the friend on my right while writing this and asked about what was difficult about crocheting. They said crocheting really isn’t hard, but knitting, now that’s hard. It’s unforgiving. A single dropped stitch and your sweater comes undone. What’s hard is maintaining the precision and consistency. I’ve never picked up a needle and couldn’t have really differentiated between the two.

Close to home is high performance driving (car on racetrack, rally driving, etc). This one is a little curious. Millions of people drive. Yet I think very few could tell you what makes one race car driver faster than another. Few people have tried to drive very fast, faster than others, and even if they have, I think they’d still not know where the skill lies till they’d tried it for a while or had it explained to them.

Pause here if you want to try generating answer for yourself. I explain in the next paragraph.

Not the only element, but high performance driving (aka driving at the limit) requires going exactly as fast as your tires^[1] will allow: no faster, no slower. If you go faster than that, your car spins and/or flies off the road; if you go slower, than somebody else with the same class of tires can beat you by getting closer to the limit. How much force your tires can transmit is dependent on dozens variables and your technique. The skilled high performance driver has a good sense of where that limit is, drives the car in a way that the limit is increased, can sense when they’ve exceeded the limit and corrected, and so on. The problem of get all you can from your tires is kind of the central challenge of race car driving.

Yet, despite also interfacing with a steering wheel and pedals, having a car with engine and wheels, the ordinary driver will [hopefully] never experience taking their tires to limit or over^[2] and hence never understand what is that a race car driver has mastered that they have not.

What of all this? Well, mostly I come here to recommend “what makes that hard?” as an illuminating question you ought to ask more often.

It’s a great way to engage with a new domain and find a trailhead for learning a new skill. It’s also a great way to solve problems and optimize processes as the hard part is typically the blocker. Plus it’s a question I’m fond of asking people at parties^[3] that’s helpful for understanding others and what they do.

1. ^{^}

   The uninitiated think car speed is all about engine size. A little bit. Actual drivers geek out over tires.

2. ^{^}

   With perhaps the exception of extreme wet or snow. A major reason that driving is as safe as it is is because legal street speeds are well below the limits of what tires can actually support.

3. ^{^}

   I won’t claim it’s a great question to ask as often people are a bit stumped with it or don’t have a good answer and the conversation can stall a little. I like asking it anyway because of all the times the answer is delicious.