Easy mode and hard mode

I've often heard that to really train effectively and improve at something, you need to be working hard. The Deliberate Practice paper, in fact, suggests that you should be working so hard that you can only manage it for a few hours, and maybe considerably less than that. This is a sort of supreme effort, pushing at the absolute frontier of your current capabilites in order to expand them.

By contrast, I've come to believe that really creative, playful and fun work only happens when you are not working too hard. That is, when your current efforts are below your capabilities. When you're giving everything to the inherent difficulty of your current task, there is nothing left over for unnecessary difficulty. Adding frills to your garment, flourishes to your magic trick, a garnish on your meal; these frivolous things aren't possible if you're struggling just to get it done at all.

I think there's a lot of value in that frivolity. Perhaps the most famous example is Feynman's wobbling plates, which he started messing around with for fun and ended up winning a Nobel Prize for. But even if your fun doesn't score you a meeting with the King of Sweden, it can still be valuable. Being able to play in the space you care about strikes me as inherently meaningful and I think the act of creation is itself meaningful in proportion to how creative that creation is.

But you can't get to that place where you can have fun with it if you never practice hard enough to make it easy. And people who are truly great manage to be creative even at very hard things. Is that a contradiction? I don't believe so. Rather, what you consider hard has become easy to them. When they practice, they are doing even greater uncreative work that you don't get to see.

So it seems to me that easy mode and hard mode, far from being opposites, are in fact complements. The easy mode provides creativity, fun, and new directions for the hard mode, and the hard mode is what allows the easy mode to exist at all.