| It's like maintaining a skyscraper built out of Tinker Toys. What I wonder is: Does the following sentence run through the head of every expert in every field? Man, I really shouldn't be getting paid for this. Any idiot could [do X]. It certainly felt true of most of my day-to-day work in graduate semiconductor electronics. It felt true of a lot of biology research. My conclusion is that there are a mere handful of days in your career when you will have to do something so hard that you will feel smart about it. But most of your career as an expert will be spent doing stuff that you know so well that it's kind of routine, even if it is totally esoteric stuff that only you know how to do. Feynman said it well when he teased the mathematicians: "Mathematicians can only prove trivial theorems, because any theorem, once proved, is immediately seen to be trivial." |
Another variation: what I do is not easy but every person practicing in my field can do this just as well as I can.
I worked very hard for many years to master my craft and always felt deficient along the way because the individual pieces seemed so daunting as I encountered and dealt with them. Not daunting in the sense of insurmountable. Just difficult. Long hours, Lots of sweating it out to get a given project done, one step at a time.
Nothing new here. Everyone who works hard to try to excel in his field goes through it.
It took me 10 years into my career to realize that many in my field (law) were not like me but contented themselves with cutting corners or otherwise coasting along while seeking to avoid the hard challenges.
Doing something right, and learning to do so consistently, is hard in any complex field. It does seem easy once you have mastered the difficulties but not that many are willing to do what it takes to get there. People are all too often content with mediocrity.