Don't forget how far you've come
If you drive, I want you to think back to the very first moments you got behind the wheel. Every turn, every traffic light, every approaching car, was a challenge that required your full attention. Now, you split your attention between the road and the radio effortlessly, often forgetting the time you spent driving when you arrive at your destination. Driving didn’t get any easier, you just better at it. In turn, you now experience automaticity[1].
Driving is a popular example, and because it is such a shared experience we don’t reflect on it too much. In the workplace, or in our hobbies, we also experience automaticity all the time, yet we never give ourselves much credit for the skills we have acquired. When we complete the half marathon, we think of how much better our time could have been, without reflecting on just how incredible it is that we finished in the first place. When we play our favourite song on the piano, the part that sticks out is the single missed note.
There are likely a few reasons for this, but I think the biggest reason is that we increasingly live in bubbles. Professionally, this is due to increases in specialization. If you are a physcist, most people in your lab will also understand the same things you do. In our hobbies, we often join niche communities or hang out on forums which select for those with the same specializations we’ve pursued. The internet is incredibly good at amplifying selection bias, but it also happens in the physical world. An example that I’ve been experiencing recently is the gym. I don’t go to a super fancy gym, but it is a smaller gym that does classes, and I constantly have to remind myself to compare my progress to where I was last month, as opposed to the person beside me benching 250 pounds.
When I talk to a gym instructor, I marvel at their technique; whereas they can no longer remember not lifting it that way[2]. When someone mentions starting a website, I have to remind myself that coding something up and hosting it through GitHub Codeberg is not the norm for so many people. Sometimes it is hard to step out of the rabbit hole, and remember what it was like at the very top.
Whatever your skillset, interests, or knowledge, take a second and reflect on the path to get to present-day you. Can you knit a scarf? Cool! I (and billions of others) can’t! That’s incredible! The reason why this sounds sarcastic is that we are so used to dismissing the things we are now good at as easy; it only seems easy in hindsight. Through recognizing this we can get better at helping others that are new to the things we enjoy, and reduce the pressure on ourselves for whatever comes next.