Comment by yomly | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yomly | Hacker News Reader

Maybe this is an unpopular opinion but "hard" is very defeatist. As yoda once said "there is no try, only do".

Hard is a relative concept - watch a one year old try to walk or a two year old try to climb over obstacles. Yet we take these tasks for granted.

Mandarin is "hard" I'm assured by many people I meet who try to learn it as a second language, and yet almost 2 billion people can speak it...

Take any <skill> that you have zero background experience in and it will feel hard. If don't have the prerequisite coordination, something like belly dancing will completely melt your brain just the same way programming will.

I happened to find programming relatively straightforward (compared to other people) but I spent a lifetime in front of computers and videogames and then studied hard STEM at college.

Just in the same way a gymnast would find snowboarding much easier than your average joe.

Personal development is an individual journey, measure your progress against yourself and approach things without ego and your progress will be so much faster.

We call STEM hard since most people fail to learn it to a passable level even when enticed with tons of money.

You can try to explain away their failures to learn in many ways, but the fact is that most people fail to learn STEM well enough to get a job doing it and instead they go to other fields considered less hard. You could say "They just didn't try hard enough" or "they just went into it with the wrong mindset" or "they just need to spend more time doing it" etc, but all of those things are signs that the field is hard.

Maybe modern education sucks? Maybe money isn't the greatest motivator for learning something? Maybe earning decent money in return for your skill at a specific skill has a high bar. Have you seen how hard it is to make money as a musician or an athlete?

Skill acquisition for something you don't have a good foundation in is hard. I have the perspective of being very good at a few things and spend the rest of my time learning new things some of which I suck at. I also know people who are in the top 0.0001% at things. Interestingly they find certain adjacent things super easy and other "easy" things very hard.

It's all relative, but getting "pretty good" at something isn't as hard as much people realise in the grand scheme of things - I think the problem is not many people have ever gotten good at one thing: go deep to go broad

Not to nitpick, but the quote is "do or do not, there is no try"

whoops I googled it and found some memes and just took that without looking deeper! Thanks for the correction, have always sucked with quotes

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