Star Simpson

Kids learn everything quickly compared to adults, and are almost always willing to make mistakes at a much higher rate than adults are. Language starts with "babbling" — I think it's just as important to "babble" in anything you're trying to learn.

The analogy of babbling includes hardware! As a child I remember saving dead alkaline batteries and making big circles on the carpeted floor of my room with them, trying to make circuits happen (-- somehow?). An adult would almost never allow themselves that kind of experiment.

(It was pretty aspirational, too until the one day I completed the circuit with less-than-dead batteries and tried to use an un-bent paperclip to complete the loop - which briefly turned red-hot between my fingertips.)

A separate line of thought here is that I often pursue learning hobbies, and am often asked if the things I am learning are "hard" to learn which feels like a .. hard question to answer. I've never found difficult the things I felt enthusiasm for - and it must vary by person.

Things take time to pick up — which is different than that thing being arduous.

I have found that the quality of learning has almost always diminished my sense of the passage of time. Something might take quite a while to attain basic mastery of, but with enthusiasm to learn that thing, it hardly seems accurate to say they were hard at all.