What Are Some Skills That Are Easy To Learn But Hard To Master?

Have you tried your hands on any one of these?

Some things in life are JUST hard.

They look hard and they ARE hard.

One example is drawing.

Very few people can call themselves “good at drawing”, and the majority will outright admit to possessing no ability in the skill at all.

The same thing goes for any type of sport that exists too.

Sure, it may only seem like a guy is lobbing a ball into a netted hoop, but we all understand how difficult it is when we actually do it ourselves.

Then, there are some skills that appear completely intuitive to learn and that everyone should know how to do, but when looked at deeper, you discover all kinds of complexity and nuances that makes it almost impossible to master.

Here are a few examples:

1. Speaking

Yep, the very first skill that almost everyone on planet earth learns turns out to be also one of the hardest things to master in life.

Everyone knows how to speak and but very few people can speak “well”.

The point of speech is to express ideas and thoughts in a coherent and understandable way in order to make the other person sympathise with either you or your ideas.

Lots of people assume that just because the listener is nodding their heads, saying “yeah”, and acting as if they care, it automatically means they believe in whatever you say.

It’s just not true.

Most of the time, it’s just out of politeness that your counterpart is doing that.

In reality, they’d rather tell you to “shut up” instead.

In the book Never Split The Difference (which teaches FBI negotiation tactics), the author Chris Voss (an ex-FBI hostage negotiator) gives a perfect example of this when he explains the distinction between “You’re right” and “That’s right”.

Say you are debating against someone about a certain topic and halfway through your sentence, they stop you and say “No, you’re right.”

How does that make you feel?

Well, if the other person delivered the line in a sincere enough tone, you might feel relieved and think they’re finally starting to understand where you are coming from.

But is that really what’s happening?

According to Chris Voss — no.

When someone says the words “You’re right”, what they’re actually saying is “Honestly, I can’t be bothered to talk with you anymore so it’d be really nice if you would just please SHUT THE FUCK UP!”

On the other hand, if the other person says “That’s right”, it means they genuinely agree with the facts you are putting out and they see the truth behind the argument you’re making.

It’s a nuanced distinction, but it tells you a lot about what your counterpart is thinking.

This of course is just one example of the many subtleties which encompass the art of speaking.

Other attributes that indicate proficiency in this skill include:

• being a great storyteller
• effectively using tonality and cadence to hook attention and portray confidence and charisma
• timing your delivery and responses perfectly
• knowing when and how to use humour and wit purposefully
• having the ability to control the flow of conversation
• possessing an incredible level of social awareness

Can you see why politicians, motivational speakers and salesmen get paid so much now?

It’s easy to pull bullshit out of your arse, but to make it sound convincing — that’s the difficult part!

2. Chess

Learning the rules takes about 10 minutes.

Learning to win takes about 2 years.

Want to be a Grandmaster? Add on another decade!

So, what makes this game so hard to beat?

Well, for a beginner, the first challenge is keeping track of all the individual pieces and figuring out which one’s under attack and which one’s already defended.

After getting a general feel for the game and playing it for a couple of months, you’ll soon start to pick up a few attacking patterns, defending positions, and checkmating strategies.

But that’s only the start.

Once you have mastered the basics, the next step is to learn the “theory”.

This includes:

• memorising thousands upon thousands of combinations of the best opening moves and endgame positions (when you get to an advanced level, the endgame becomes the hardest part of the entire game)
• learning how to value each piece depending on the situation (e.g. sometimes even a queen can be sacrificed to gain a positional advantage)
• learning all the mid-game attack strategies
• thousands of hours of practice

If you’ve done all of that, you should now be at an Elo of around 2000 meaning you’re well on your way to becoming a FIDE Master (the official term for a chess master).

Most players would simply stop here and call it a day, but, if you really want to play at championship level and compete against the likes of people like Hikaru Nakamura and Magnus Carlson, then you’ll need to spend at least a few more decades grinding away at the game.

Why?

It’s to hone your intuition.

In chess, there is no mathematical calculation that we have to solve in our heads to find the perfect move in a given situation.

Most of the time, it’s all down to what “looks like” the right move.

In a normal game, there is a fixed time limit for each player so it’s impossible to evaluate all the possible moves that are available to you.

To get around this, top players will take a quick glance at the board and immediately get an idea of what move to make.

They then start evaluating the different variations and possible outcomes of that move to confirm if their hunch was right.

In fact, this is also how modern AI chess engines do it as well.

Back in the old days, chess programs use to manually calculate all the possible variations and use mathematical analysis to determine the best move. But, after just a couple of moves, the calculations became so enormous that it just wasn’t practical even for a machine to carry out.

The solution — neural networks.

By feeding a small machine learning model with a bunch of data, it starts to pick up patterns of play and “remembers” them as decimal numbers or “weights” (at least that’s what the scientists are calling it).

This reduces a lot of computational power but it has the downside of being sort of like a black box. We don’t know how it comes up with the solution, only that it does.

Kinda sounds a bit similar to human intuition, doesn’t it?

3. Lockpicking

Easy to learn?!

Yep! All those spy films you ever watched overhyped this skill WAY too much.

In fact, you can purchase a simple lock pick set from Amazon today and break into their own house within an hour or two of practice!

No, the secret service will not come knocking on your door.

Yes, your neighbours will give you funny looks.

The basic theory is actually really easy to understand and learn.

All you’re doing is applying a little torque on the keyhole while pushing random pins up and down with your pick, hoping that one eventually gets stuck.

What IS hard is trying to open it faster than breaking in with a sledgehammer.

After all, which thief wants to stick around in front of some locked safe for an hour?

Unless there’s a bunch of cash inside the safe and the victim is on holiday or something, most criminals simply won’t bother.

Even a locked out homeowner won’t want to stand outside in the cold for that amount of time!

You’ll be demanding your money back from the locksmith for doing such a shit job!

If lock picking is to be useful, then speed and finesse is going to be needed.

That’s the first difficulty in mastering this skill.

It can take months of practice to reliably open a wide range of locks within a couple of minutes.

The pros? They can do it in SECONDS!

The second difficulty comes when you learn about all the different security measures out there on locks.

Sure, the standard lock on your front door may not have the best security features (I know, it’s stupid), but there are plenty of locks out there that do.

Some of these features include:

• Security pins
• Narrow keyways that are hard to manoeuvre around
• Blocked pins
• Different lock styles other than the classic pin and tumbler design— wafer locks, dimple locks, tubular locks, paracentric locks, cruciform locks, etc.

It’s impossible to master every single type of lock out there since there are new designs created every day.

I’d highly recommend checking out the LockpickingLawyer on YouTube if you are interested in learning more about this!

I really wanted to include a lot more skills in this post, but I’m realising the list is way too long.

I made sure to only write about skills that I had experience with but it was interesting to research all the individual topics in detail and find out what it really took to become proficient in each field.

Hopefully, you enjoyed this article and drop me a follow if you did!

Comment your thoughts down below and let me know what other skills you would’ve wanted to read about in this article.

If you want to be the first to get notified whenever I post a new article and potentially receive other free stuff that I may give out in the future, consider joining my newsletter here!

Also, if you haven’t subscribed to Medium yet and would like to help support what I do, you can use this link to sign up for it, and a small cut of the monthly subscription will go towards helping me write more posts like this!