Let me tell you about my job. I am given a document. It can be about anything, I don't know what it's going to be about. It's written by someone who has enough expert knowledge to write the document and knows the entire context. Oh, and it's written in another language. I take that document and rewrite it in English. To do this, I have to study, learn and research the context and subject matter so that it sounds like it's written by an expert who know the entire context and that it was originally written in English. If there are mistakes in the source text, I correct them. If the author of the source text borrowed wording from other sources, I find those sources even if they're not cited. If the source text does not say what the author intends it to, my translation will. I do this every day, on tight deadlines, always competently and sometimes very well.
And yet I can't get my hair to hold a curl. I can't keep my apartment organized. I can't get my manicure to last a week. I can't park a car in an indoor/underground parking garage. And I really have to work up my nerve to walk into a store that's staffed by people who are cooler than I am (even though they're paid specifically to be cool, whereas I have to fit in being cool around full-time work).
3 comments:
I can write letters that are frequently published in a newspaper, but I can't throw a ball for distance or accuracy. But I don't think that means throwing a ball is harder than writing a good letter.
I think throwing a ball actually is harder, because you can't expedite physical fitness training as much as you can expedite intellectual/academic training. If it takes for example a total of 30 hours of practise to get your letter-writing right, you could conceivably do it all in a row with a lot of coffee. But if it takes a total of 2,000 reps with weights to get your arms strong enough to throw a ball, you couldn't do those all in a row even if it were physically possible. You have to do a certain number and then give your muscles time to rest and then do more in a day or two.
I think which is harder depends a lot on innate abilities. People without good language skills find writing very difficult. People (like me) with no athletic ability find ball-throwing really difficult.
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