With many skills, it is understood that you're expected to spend months, or even years of hard study and practice to be truly "good" at them. Art comes to mind; skills like violin, chess, martial arts, programming, writing, etc. It is also understood that you're going to be pretty bad at skills like this until you've put in some requisite level of time, which might be well into the hundreds of hours.
There's another group of aptitudes in life that might be no less complicated than many of those skills at the beginner level -- but that people expect to be instantly serviceable at, without much time and effort.
(Okay, there are people who expect to instantly be good at skills like art/programming and get burned for that. But the difference is that it doesn't take a lot to realize the first group will take a lot of time to master, but even smart people won't always realize that about the second group, or even realize that the second group are "skills" at all.)
What's the difference here? Something having a reputation as a skill or a surrounding culture that treats it as a skill, vs. not?
Some specific examples of the second group I've run into:
"Learning to use new software" is an example that I've been dealing with lately. I've noticed many people when they're using new, unfamiliar programs will write off anything tricky/confusing as "bad software design" and sometimes even tap out of using the program. I used to do that regretfully often in the past, but since then I've found it a lot more rewarding to treat every new program as a new skill and expect to put in at least a few hours to be even borderline comfortable with some of the trickier aspects of using it.
"Enjoying social media" is another example. Early on in using this site, I adopted a natural habit of following unusually good, insightful poster I came across (in addition to following many other accounts about my specific interests). Eventually I had a feed that was simply way, way too heavy in discourse/drama that I didn't want read and (that wasn't easily suppressed by muffling tags, because it would be about dozens of different subjects). It would have been super easy for me to say "the vibes are off here, let's find another site to use." But since I've tried to get good at lots of different skills, I recognized the pattern right away: I was something that made perfect sense to me but that was flawed for some other reason. I realized quickly that simply following every good, insightful poster without thinking about the "proportion" of types of posters in my feed is not so good! Following isn't just "I think you're a very good poster" even if there's some overlap. "Enjoying social media" seems like something you should be good at simply by using common sense, but idk about that.
Imo it's super rewarding to think of every mundane thing as a skill that can be improved, even if sometimes it's not. Because human nature is to err too much in the other direction.
Any other examples you've dealt with personally or noticed?
in that we attribute a lot of our success to having a few of these...
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knowing whether you understand something or not
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coming up with questions that lead to useful answers when searching the web, a library, etc
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sorting out relevant from irrelevant information
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skimming a piece of writing or other information to find out the intentions and perspective of its author, prior to engaging deeply with it
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relating things you hear about to things you already know from other contexts
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noticing your level of emotional attachment to a subject, then letting go or cultivating more connection depending on your priorities
we could probably go on. a lot of the above are drawn from a writing project we have been slowly accumulating material for, which might someday be a mini-memoir or something (we see no reason to do the indulgent book-length thing, nobody's life is so interesting that anyone wants to read an entire book about it)
- distinguishing your own factual knowledge from your own opinions
- distinguishing other people's assertions of fact from expressions of opinions (possibly better than they themselves did; see previous item)
- distinguishing opinions from emotions
- identifying why you know (or think you know) something
- attributing sources
- vetting sources
- recognizing rage-bait
- recognizing disinformation (plenty of overlap with rage-bait)
- convincing like-minded people who've fallen for disinformation that it's disinformation
- convincing other people to do things