I remember once having a discussion with a guy who knew a lot about professional basketball. He had read an article from a big sample of NBA players who they felt would be the most formidable one-on-one opponent in the league. The answer was fairly unanimous: Vince Carter. Now that’s surprising. Why Carter and not Kobe Bryant or LeBron James or any number of other, far more accomplished, offensive players? The answer, this guy told me, was the same in nearly every case: “you have no idea how hard it is to do the things that Carter does.”

I’ve always remembered that story, because it strikes me that applies to nearly every case where an outsider tries to make sense of an insider’s perspective. We can see all the things that someone, in a different profession than us, does. What we cannot know is the relative difficulty of those tasks. I know a reverse slam is harder than a simple dunk. But how much harder? And how much harder again would a slam be if you had a defender drapped all over you? (I also know very little about sports as well)

I was really bored one day and was actually watching golf. I remember watching Phil Mickelson at the PGA (or was it the U.S Open?). He was in the rough, just off the green, and chipped within a few feet of the hole. Ho-hum, I thought. He bogeyed the hole. Mickelson had taken a FULL swing at a ball in an impossible lie and sent it 20 feet, to within an easy putt of the hole. I’ve never played golf, so I had no idea how hard that was, or why that was anything special. The announcer, though, had a completely different perspective.

I think that misunderstanding over degree of difficulty issues is one of the major reasons for conflict between insiders and outsiders. We bridle at the school teacher who asks for a raise, because we don’t realize–and we can never realize unless we’ve been a teacher ourselves–how hard being a school teacher is. Mickelson shoots 75 and says, afterward, he thought he had a great round and we scoff, but only because we don’t know golf the way he does and we don’t understand how insanely difficult that chip shot was.