Scott Young

The person who has been drawing their whole life and is quite good, a lot of these procedures that you would have to learn explicitly are so obvious to them.

They're so automatic that they just do them without even thinking about them.

And so they're like, well, you just draw it, right?

And so that can also, I think, make it seem like it's talent when really it is a skill that could be taught that has been so overlearned to the point that they're not able to convey it to you anymore.

I mean, I've met people who are like really good at their job, but they think their job is like kind of boring and they'd rather do something that's more exciting.

So it's not always the case that you always like things that you do.

But again, going to this self-efficacy, this kind of like niche finding idea, it's no surprise that we like the things that we're good at.

And if you're able to get good at something or you're able to get better at something that you tend to like it more.

So I think there's a there's a good correlation there, even if it's not one to one.

Well, I mean, I don't know.

I think that a lot of what we like about skills is this tension between being able to do it and also recognizing we're not able to do it.

I mean, when things are so easy, they become boring too.

So it is a tension.

A skill has to have a certain amount of complexity and competitiveness and reward that

you know, it requires your attention.

I mean, the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, he had this whole flow idea, which was that, you know, when things are too easy, they become so effortless that we don't even think about them.

When they're too hard, they become frustrating.

And this sort of zone where we're like totally absorbed and engaged and happy with it, that happens at this kind of, this sort of right level of difficulty.

Yeah, I mean, some of that I think is when you have a well-learned skill, there is a kind of, again, going back to this flow idea that where you are not being too deliberate about it, you're not being too focused on what you're doing and you can kind of lose yourself in the skill.

But at the same time, I think it requires a lot of like external conditions.