How to make hard things look easy

She’s definitely got other tricks up her sleeve. (Illustration by Jules Garnier, 1889.)

When I was a kid, I was just in awe of professional musicians. How do you get up on stage and play song after song and not mess up?

Well, I’m still in awe of professional musicians, but now I understand something fundamental: Most of the time, whatever they’re doing up there is as easy as driving around town or carrying on a conversation.

It takes a degree of effort and concentration, but it’s within the range of routine activities. They’re not pushing themselves so hard that they’re risking a train wreck in front of hundreds or thousands of people. They’re doing something that they can already reliably do.

We all know what this is like, actually. We can all do things easily that used to be overwhelmingly difficult, like writing our names, tying our shoes, or not getting ice cream all over our face when eating a particularly delicious cone. We add new skills to our repertoire, and through repetition and refinement, they become second nature.

Sometimes, however, we might be looking for a particular result, and we want to skip to the part where we’re already polished at the new skill. We might challenge ourselves to write a song, short story, or Instagram post on par with the pros.

And that’s how some of us end up with dozens of rejected song fragments, story beginnings, and selfies in our quest for something good enough. We’re stretching ourselves too far and predictably unhappy with the results.

When our reach exceeds our grasp, we have two options:

We can go to the woodshed and work on getting better in private, hour by hour, day by day.

We can also stop reaching so far and be content, for the moment, with that which we can easily achieve. This is what we share with the world.

In fact, we can pursue both of these options simultaneously. As we improve, the level of what we can confidently share will also improve. In other words, to make hard things look easy in public, we can practice doing even harder things in private.

If I’m helping an eight-year-old pianist prepare for a recital that’s six weeks away, we’re not going to choose the piece that is at the leading edge of her ability and the cause of much current frustration. We’ll pick something that she mastered two weeks ago and has mostly memorized. That way, under the stress of public performance, she will still perform confidently.

We’ll keep working on the scary piece, to be sure. And maybe in six months, it will be an appropriate recital piece. But not today.

It’s possible that, through intense effort, the young pianist could put together the fancy piece and perform it. She could push herself past her set point to achieve something that’s technically beyond her capabilities. There are times when this might be appropriate or desirable. However, it is not sustainable in the long term.

All the pros who make stuff look easy can do so because the stuff they’re doing is easy for them (plus, they often have an entire team behind them). A trained singer doesn’t need to splice together a hundred takes in the recording studio to get one decent performance. Whatever he’s singing is all in a day’s work. He can just knock it out in a couple of complete takes. He’s already put in the hours and hours to prepare for this moment; as a result of that investment, a high-caliber performance is within his comfort zone.

Of course, authors will always complain about how their work never gets any easier and it’s just pure torture to write a book. But they’re not agonizing over the basics. They’ve got their grammar down, they know how to write an outline, they have an established workflow. However they make it sound, they’re not sitting next to a wastebasket filled with crumpled paper. They know how to buckle up for the long ride and get closer to the destination, day by day.

If you want to achieve big things, great! That ambition is a powerful fuel. But instead of trying to leap directly to the big impact you want to have or the incredible art you want to make only to be disappointed, you might get better results if you keep pursuing steady, incremental progress. It’s not as glamorous, but it gets the job done.

Keep challenging yourself, but understand that you don’t have to challenge yourself continuously. There will come a day when what’s easy for you is impressive to others. Don’t be surprised when it happens — and don’t be surprised when it’s not as exciting as you thought it would be. There will always be another mountain to climb. But you don’t have to figure out how to do it on stage.