Shortly after launching Nice Translator, I became friends with a teenage user from Greece. He emailed me to report a problem and we continued chatting after I found out he was interested in learning to program.

One day, talking about HTML, I shared a thought I’d recently had about learning: something is only hard when you don’t know how to do it. This may seem obvious, but I don’t think we generally approach new skills with that in mind.

My Greek friend would look at my programming and say ”Wow, that’s hard to do.“, doubting whether he could do it himself.

Although I once felt the same way as I pored over tangles of code, that generally isn’t how I experience it these days. Programming poses challenging problems, but it’s not hard for me to do. And in between those challenges, it’s really pretty easy.

We treat difficulty as a trait laden within a skill when it is actually a subjective perception.

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Hard, Challenging, Easy

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First, I think we need to get a few things straight because I can already hear your brain trying to convince you that hard and challenging are the same thing and that easy is completely different. But, I see them as three distinct feelings we encounter when we try to do something, so let me clarify the differences:

Hard: “There are barriers ahead and I don’t know how to scale them.” – We say something is hard when we don’t know how to do it and, on top of that, don’t know how to figure out how to do it.

Break dancing is something that I’ve thought about doing but never put much effort into. As a result, I don’t even know where to begin. Watching someone break dance looks like sheer magic, I don’t understand how it’s possible. To me, it seems so hard.

Challenging: “There are barriers ahead and I know I can bust through them.” – To the break dancer, what they do takes a lot of physical and mental energy; they’re pulling out moves they’ve never done before and they don’t know if they’re going to work.

But it’s challenging, not hard. They have strategy and technique, they understand how it should work. If it doesn’t, they know how to figure out what went wrong and tweak from there.

Easy: “There are no barriers.” – But truthfully, when they’re really in the groove and having the most fun – flipping and spinning and doing all the things that look so impressive to me – that’s when it feels easiest to them. That’s when there isn’t much conscious thought at all and everything is just flowing, one move to the next. We all experience this in one activity or another.

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Language is an example that we can all relate to. Most of the time, speaking your native tongue is so easy, you don’t even have to think about it. Despite the fact that speaking is an incredibly complex skill, words often just flow naturally with thoughts.

But if you find yourself writing a poem, or a blog post like me right now, you will no doubt come to moments where those very same skills suddenly feel incredibly challenging.

And, of course, when you try to understand or speak a language you have little experience with, that same skill feels unfathomably hard. I find it impossible to believe anyone can understand and speak Arabic. Yet, my dad and his family do, with ease.

Difficulty varies by person and circumstance – it is not inherently stitched into anything we do.