Imagine you were always good at throwing a javelin. You could throw it further and faster than anybody else in your school. You would watch as other students pa

Imagine you were always good at throwing a javelin. You could throw it further and faster than anybody else in your school. You would watch as other students painfully go through the motions of getting their form down: positioning the javelin at just the right angle, doing that weird prancing motion as they run, and gripping it just so. All the while your natural strength and ability bested their most valiant efforts. However, over the course of months and years of training, their form improved. Their technique got better. And soon, they were constantly besting your every throw. This is the point at which your natural talent is exhausted and now you too need to learn the technique in order to make any advances. The problem is that your fellow athletes have already put in their 10,000 hours mastering the technique and building their muscle memory to achieve the best possible throw. And you rapidly fall behind, unable to keep up with their slow but relentless progress. This is actually a poor analogy for knowledge work, but a similar principle applies. Many people get by being able to easily soak in the knowledge and intuit the correct solutions without having to put in much effort at all. Even if they fully understand the theory and practice of how to mechanically arrive at a solution, the habit of not having to invest significant energy in determining a solution stays with them. The problems get harder, beyond what their capacity to intuit affords them. Gaps in their knowledge become magnified and soon their understanding of a subject is shown to be a shallow house of cards. At this point, they could choose to accept that they need to completely change strategies, fill in the gaps, and no longer rely on their intuitition. However, habits die hard and many struggle in vain to wrap their heads around the problems instead of working through them systematically. Unwilling or not realizing that they need to change, they lose motivation and burn out.