Does it get easier with time and practice?

questioning a universal assumption

It is a nearly universal wish that things get easier over time and with practice, so that effort declines and success is assured. We assume that what was initially difficult eventually becomes automatic, that we are somehow capable of training our systems. I feel it is necessary to call these assumptions about effort vs. ease into question. Things do not get easier, even if some tasks become automatized, because the goals grow along with the performance, perhaps even more quickly. In other words, task A is now easy, but I have switched to trying to master B, and so on…

The better you get the higher you aspire, while motivation shifts from trying to reduce dissatisfaction to trying to increase satisfaction. We are always moving towards a desired standard, but this standard keeps getting replaced with a higher one, so we never arrive at a static and stable cause of self-satisfaction.

Think about someone rising to a very high level of proficiency in something. They begin as a novice and slowly attain mastery and expertise. Obviously their behavioural goals change throughout this process. Of course, not everyone stays with it or manages to achieve a high level of skill and knowledge. For those who go on to mastery, motivation and imagination keep producing new challenges and new plans of action to solve them, while other people give up and shift to other goals.

Isn't this a trap — a bottomless pit of perfectionistic masochism? Well, it could be, if that’s your thing. Or it could be a complement to acceptance and self-compassion. Think how nicely mastery motivation, acceptance and self-compassion might work together…

Perhaps the difference between those who achieve expertise and those who drop out is in how much they hope that things will get easier. The more that practice feels like a burden the more difficult it seems. For someone who embraces the challenge and understands that learning takes work, and accepts that, there is much less questioning of the costs of change. It is not that it gets “easier,” just that thoughts of hard and easy are not so important.

For the person who sticks with something, pours his heart into it, and uses all of his resources and imagination to get better, there is really nothing else he would rather be doing.