Skill looks like magic to anyone who didn’t watch the thousand boring hours.

Competence at a distance is indistinguishable from talent, because the process that produced it is invisible and extremely dull. Nobody films the repetitions. What you see is the compressed result, and the natural conclusion is that the person was simply built that way, which is comforting and wrong.

When you admire something, go and find out what the practice actually looked like. Ask how many hours, and what the boring part was. It makes the thing feel more possible. And when your own work looks unimpressive from inside, remember that this is what the hours feel like while you are in them.