Learning to do something yourself changes how you evaluate other people’s work.

Once you have tried to do something yourself, you understand where the difficulty actually sits. You stop being impressed by the flashy part and start noticing the joint that must have been hard, the decision that took judgment. Your assessments of other people’s work become both more generous and more discriminating.

Whenever you regularly judge work you have never attempted, spend a few hours attempting it badly. Cook the dish, write the code, make the drawing. You are not aiming for skill. You are buying the ability to tell the difference between what is genuinely difficult and what merely looks it.