The Skill You Think You Don’t Have (and the Myth of “I Can’t”)

by Dan Roque | Reading Time: 7 minutes | In Digital Literacy

It’s always a little weird when people ask me if I do something.

“You paint?”
“You play tabletop RPGs?”
“You write poems?”
“You can do that in Excel?”
“You play billiards?”

Yes. All of them. And more.

Usually their eyes light up—like they’ve discovered a rare species in the wild: a person with hobbies. Then they tell me the same story: how they’ve wanted to try it since they were young, how it’s been sitting on their “one day” list for years.

And then comes the weirder part.

When I say, “You should try it,” they recoil—softly. Politely. Like I’ve offered them a haunted object. They’ll say they can’t. Or they don’t have time. Or it’s “not for them.” Then they call it frustration, like it’s a personality trait.

But most of the time, “frustration” is just fear wearing a nicer outfit.

Fear of being bad at something in public.
Fear of not improving fast enough.
Fear of the unknown—and the humiliating first steps that come with it.

Here’s the thing: I learned how to paint miniatures, play the ukulele, and build pivot tables and graphs in the same year back in 2016. That didn’t prove I’m talented. I don’t even worship “talent” the way people think they should. Talent is a great shortcut… but it’s not a requirement. Passion + repetition is the actual engine. Good, old, boring repetition. You do the thing, you suck, you learn, you suck less, you learn again.

This is why I think people get spooked by AI right now.

AI has become the newest “magic hobby.” People look at it the way they look at art or music: “That's awesome… but that’s not for me.” They assume it belongs to geniuses, coders, or the chosen ones who attended the secret meeting everyone else missed.

But AI—like painting, Excel, or writing—has learnable gears. It isn’t a spell. It’s a system.

And if there’s one CasiornThinks principle I keep coming back to, it’s this: when you can see the mechanism, the intimidation starts to evaporate. The jargon stops being gatekeeping. The “magic” becomes a machine you can reason about.

So if you’ve been calling something your “frustration,” try a different question.

Not “Can I do it?”
Not “Am I the kind of person who does that?”
But this:

How bad do I want it?

Because if you want it bad enough to tolerate being bad at it for a while—then congratulations. That’s literally the whole secret.