June 20
Difficulty is the nurse of ability. Anyone who has never met resistance has never come to know their full strength.
Self-Help (freely rendered)
Listening mode
Difficulty is the nurse of ability. Anyone who has never met resistance has never come to know their full strength.
What comes easily to you, you often know surprisingly poorly. You can do it, but you don't really know how. If someone asks how you put a tangled text in order so quickly, or defuse an argument, you can hardly find the words. It just worked.
It's different with what you've had to work hard for. There you know the places where you got stuck, the wrong approaches and the moment when something shifted. You came by this knowledge the long way round, but you know it more exactly. You could explain it to someone who is stuck at that very spot right now.
That doesn't mean effort is the better school. Some of what was hard only cost you time and showed you nothing. And a gift is worth no less for being impossible to explain.
It's just that you can't rely on it in the same way. As long as it simply works, you don't know what you would do if it ever failed you. A skill that has never faltered hasn't yet shown you its limits.
At some point the easy thing may not come off. Then you'll stand before it like a beginner and see, for the first time, what it is made of.
