In the first stage of learning, we figure out what to do.

The next stage is to be able to do it.

Then comes the ability to do it well, over and over again, over a period of time.

In your profession, projects, and pastimes, you find yourself playing in all three of these stages at once, based on your knowledge, skill, and stamina in different aspects of the work.

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An important aspect of planning for a trip is deciding which board games to take.

Isn’t it?

Well, it is for us. And because our next trip requires a flight and we won’t have a lot of space, we’re going to be taking a board game that is really more of a card game — just a few tokens and decks.

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Tracing the journey of people who have become wildly successful on YouTube, it seems inevitable that they were going to make it.

This is a classic case of confirmation bias, because nobody’s paying attention to all of the creators who didn’t make it.

Then again, who is the judge of whether creators didn’t make it?

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I cleaned the kitchen yesterday. Good for me!

Unfortunately, I only cleaned it after breakfast. I neglected to clean it after dinner, so I have a bunch of dishes, pots, and pans waiting for me this morning.

As much as I’d like to think of cleaning the kitchen as a project that I can just do once and get out of the way, it’s more of a practice — a project that must be done every day, or even more than once a day.

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A friend of mine is learning German.

She’s trying. But she keeps stalling out.

A brilliant woman with multiple degrees, she is certainly capable of learning a new language. However, she’s getting stuck. “I don’t want to be frustrated like this in my free time.” The process is feeling awfully unpleasant for something she’s doing for fun.

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