I don't know why this short piece hit me, perhaps because I'm struggling with a poem, struggling to learn Hebrew, tried and failed to learn piano, perhaps because I've tried to draw owls, but it seems apropos to my state of mind this morning. This from Ben Casnocha's interesting blog on current affairs and intellectual life:

I believe a key reason so many people on the road to mastery call it quits is not because drawing a beautiful owl in pencil is superhumanly hard. It's because they thought it would be easy