I like efficiency. I like understanding a problem, finding the shortest way to deal with it and moving on.

The problem is, after doing this for long enough, you start expecting everything else to work at the same speed.

A meeting feels too long. Someone is explaining something and you already know where it is going. A question feels obvious, a mistake looks avoidable, and at some point you start thinking, how are we still here?

Experience changes what feels normal.

Once you have seen the same problem many times, the next one looks easy. Once you know the shortcut, watching somebody take the long way feels unnecessary.

But it was not always easy for us either.

You notice this very clearly when you go back to something you have not touched for a long time. Suddenly you are searching for things you once knew by heart, trying something that does not work, going back, checking again and basically learning the thing for a second time.

And it is a bit humbling, actually.

You look at something you used to know and think, what did I do here last time?

Then you try a few things. One of them works. You remember another piece. You start seeing the pattern again. After a while, the thing that looked completely foreign an hour ago starts feeling familiar.

That part is easy to forget.

We usually remember the point where something became easy, not all the attempts before it. The wrong guesses, the stupid questions, the things we tried just to see what would happen.

Some people understand certain things faster, some are naturally better at particular kinds of work. That is true.

But I also think we underestimate how much can change just by spending enough time with something.

A lot of things we are comfortable doing today were once things we had no idea how to do. We just kept touching them until they stopped feeling foreign.

And relearning something makes this strangely visible.

You can actually watch yourself go from I have no idea what I am doing to oh, right, now I remember.

That progress may be small, but it is real.

Which is probably why I find it hard to believe that the first few bad attempts at something mean very much.

Sometimes you are bad at it because you are bad at it.

Sometimes you are just early.

So if something feels difficult, confusing or embarrassingly slow at the beginning, maybe the answer is not to decide too quickly that it is “not for you.”

Touch it again.

Try something.

Get it wrong.

Come back to it later.

A surprising amount of learning seems to happen exactly like that.