Watching planes land at the airport is a free lesson in how smooth hard things look when they’re practiced.

Skill disguises difficulty. A plane settling onto a runway looks simple from the fence precisely because the person flying it has done the same thing a thousand times, and that smoothness fools you whenever you watch anybody good. You end up measuring your early fumbling against somebody else’s late competence and deciding the difference must be talent.

Take something you watched somebody do easily and find out how long they spent learning it. Then ask what your own version is meant to look like at your number of hours. Compare stages rather than comparing yourself to a finished product.