There’s a peculiar transformation that happens when you truly understand a process. What once seemed insurmountable becomes manageable. What felt like chaos reveals itself as ordered steps. The building becomes easier not because the work itself has changed, but because your relationship to it has fundamentally shifted.
I’ve watched this happen across every domain imaginable. A novice programmer stares at a blank screen, paralyzed by the infinite possibilities and unknown pitfalls. An experienced developer sees patterns, recognizes familiar problems, and knows which tools to reach for before even touching the keyboard. A first-time home renovator feels overwhelmed by the sheer number of decisions and unknowns. Someone on their third project moves through the same challenges with a calm efficiency that looks like magic to outsiders.
The difference isn’t talent or intelligence. It’s understanding.When you don’t understand a process, everything feels equally important and equally mysterious. You can’t distinguish between critical decisions and minor details. You don’t know which problems will cascade into disasters and which will resolve themselves. Every step forward feels like a gamble because you can’t see far enough ahead to know if you’re heading in the right direction. The cognitive load is immense because you’re simultaneously trying to execute the process while also trying to understand what the process even is.
But as understanding deepens, something remarkable happens. The fog lifts. You begin to see the underlying structure, the natural sequence of events, the causal relationships between different elements. You learn which variables actually matter and which ones you’ve been worrying about needlessly. You develop an intuition for when something is going wrong before it becomes obvious. Most importantly, you can hold the entire process in your mind at once rather than stumbling through it one confusing step at a time.
This mental model acts as a scaffold for everything else. When you understand the principles behind what you’re building, you can adapt when circumstances change. You can troubleshoot effectively because you know how the pieces fit together. You can make intelligent tradeoffs because you understand what you’re trading. You can work faster not because you’re cutting corners, but because you’re no longer wasting time on dead ends and false starts.
Consider learning to cook. The first time you follow a recipe, it’s a rigid set of instructions that must be obeyed exactly. You measure everything precisely, check the recipe constantly, and panic when something doesn’t look quite right. But once you understand what’s actually happening in the pan, once you grasp the relationship between heat and protein, between acid and flavor, between texture and time, cooking becomes fluid. You can adjust on the fly, substitute ingredients intelligently, and even create new dishes without a recipe at all. The process hasn’t become easier because the recipes got simpler. It became easier because you now understand what you’re actually doing.
The same principle applies to writing, to starting a business, to raising children, to learning an instrument, to anything worth building. The process remains complex, but complexity and difficulty aren’t the same thing. Complexity is about the number of interconnected parts. Difficulty is about how hard it is to navigate that complexity. Understanding transforms one into the other.
This is why mentorship is so valuable. A good mentor doesn’t just tell you what to do next. They help you build the mental model that makes the entire process comprehensible. They point out patterns you haven’t noticed yet, explain why certain approaches work better than others, and help you develop the judgment that only comes from understanding. They’re essentially giving you their hard-won understanding so you don’t have to discover everything through trial and error.
But understanding doesn’t arrive all at once. It accumulates gradually, often imperceptibly, through repeated exposure and reflection. Each time you work through a process, you notice something new. You make connections between pieces that seemed unrelated. You start to predict what will happen next. You recognize situations you’ve encountered before. The process becomes easier not in a sudden leap but through a steady accumulation of insights that eventually reach a tipping point where everything clicks into place.
The implication is both humbling and encouraging. It means that the difficulty you’re experiencing right now isn’t necessarily a sign that you’re not cut out for this work. It might simply mean you’re still building your understanding. The expert who makes it look effortless struggled through the same confusion you’re feeling now. They just kept going long enough for understanding to develop.
It also means that the best investment you can make when learning to build something new is to focus on genuine understanding rather than just following instructions. Seek out explanations of why things work the way they do. Build simplified versions to test your mental model. Reflect on your mistakes and near-misses to extract lessons. Ask questions that help you see the bigger picture, not just complete the immediate task.
The process of building will always require effort and skill. But the better you understand it, the more that effort can go toward actually building rather than fighting through confusion. The work doesn’t disappear, but it transforms from an overwhelming puzzle into a series of knowable challenges. And that transformation makes all the difference.