> The easiness or difficulty of a domain or discipline is always in relation to some individual context; and that context includes variables that the learner controls
> But nothing is hard unless you are in a great hurry or you don’t really want to do the thing.
I got told this many, many times in my life, and it was incredibly frustrating when it was something I really wanted to do. I discovered after 34 years that I have ADHD, which makes a lot of stuff that can eventually become easy/easier with patience and perseverance to in practice be extremely hard.
I'm bringing this up because a lifetime of guilt and shame for not being able to accomplish something when it was deemed easy, that it "just requires some discipline", said by someone else pushed me away from a lot of things I'm interested in but wasn't able to keep motivated to do them after shame set in. It can spiral if you feel inadequate, and if you live with this you feel inadequate and "catching up" a lot of times.
Specifically, one of those things was music. I tried learning instruments when I was younger but the motivation was not in learning the instrument itself, it was music as a whole. I wanted to understand how it worked and how I could create it, not plow through guitar strumming exercises for months and months, then fingering techniques, then be able to play a few songs, and maybe in some years actually start to create something. To me what worked, in my natural branching way of thinking/learning, was to start producing electronic music some 4 years ago. Just some stupidly cacophonic basic loops in the beginning, which pushed my interest to learn the basics of music theory, learning the basics cleared to me a map I could guide myself through skills I was missing: rhythms, harmony, active listening, etc. After I started understanding what skills I needed to achieve what I wanted then it pushed my motivation to learn an instrument, the piano, and then learning the mechanical skills of the instrument made sense.
I bring this up because since I was diagnosed I had multiple conversations with people that suffered through the same as myself: being called undisciplined, inpatient, disinterested when they couldn't muster the motivation to plow through a structured path when it got boring to them. And that is not under my control, ADHD is much more about lacking motivation control than being hyperactive or actually having an "attention deficit", I get obsessed by things I'm interested in (music is an example), it's just that most of the resources to educate oneself on a discipline/domain is not tailored for people who needs to branch out, find pockets of skills that are interesting and motivating to learn, and putting the puzzle back together after acquiring some skills in a haphazard way than the usual structured learning path.