Don't Assume It's Difficult Until It Is

The first part resonate a lot with me. I wanted to learn Russian (because why not ?), I intuitively thought the Cyrillic alphabet would be the hardest part of all, like it&#x27;s another alphabet and you can&#x27;t read anything right ? Sounds really difficult...<p>Actually it&#x27;s the easiest part of the language because it&#x27;s 99% phonetic with some few exceptions, the whole alphabet is in reality quite small and it was actually easier to learn how to read Russian than reading English. The hard part is actually more the grammar (with those cases) and the vocabulary more than the reading itself. I still have a very basic level but the alphabet part took like only 4 hours maybe to remember them all.<p>But it&#x27;s also the same when coding, the hard parts are not always where I expect them to be.

This reminds me of babies. A lot of people assume that changing diapers or sleep deprivation is the hard part of having a baby. For me, though, the hard part is actually just that babies are kind of boring, and the boringness of having to watch them constantly grinds you down.<p>That definitely wasn&#x27;t what I was expecting to be hard when considering whether to have a baby.<p>(Fortunately they get more interesting over time.)

I feel like this is good advice but presents only one side of the coin. Underestimating how difficult something is, is exactly what leads to &#x27;&#x27;planning fallacy&#x27;&#x27;. I would rather err on the side of caution and overestimate how difficult something is

Personally, when troubleshooting software, I&#x27;ve always found that stating assumptions, testing them both for false and true values, and writing the results down, makes for good (albeit sometimes slow) forward progress.<p>Of course, you get those bugs that occur with seemingly zero difference in your methods, and that&#x27;s when you need to start thinking creatively...

This is honestly how I felt about shaving with a straight razor. Everyone I spoke to about it was like &quot;you&#x27;re crazy! you&#x27;ll cut yourself. At the very least use a safety razor to warm up to something like that.&quot; I had a gift card to Art of Shaving, and bought a shavette.<p>Two weeks in, I haven&#x27;t cut myself once, and I shave faster and better than I ever have.

Good lesson to learn =&#x2F;