Hard Skills
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About seven years ago I took my first 26+2 hot yoga class, and it turned out to be The Thing I Didn’t Know I Was Looking For. It’s an addictive little series of 26 postures and two breathing exercises, done in the same sequence every time, and always in 105º heat. One of the core tenets of the practice is that you are your own best teacher.
While it's incredibly tempting to adopt this as a personal philosophy (and look, it is true that a shocking amount of self-realization happens when you're trying to stay alive during a 90-minute class), things fall apart when it's applied in a broader context. Concrete outcomes vary wildly when following intuition over example, and hard skills rarely get sharp without a heavy dose of tutorial. Born to search the glittering rooms of my heart…forced to seek online education. Typical.
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In an attempt to break through Duolingo-stasis, I recently started weekly conversation classes with an online Spanish tutor. It's similar to therapy in that I spend each 50-minute session talking entirely about myself—but since I can't yet speak in the past tense, we focus less on unpacking childhood trauma and more on what I plan on cooking for dinner that night. I'm sure I will one day have the faculty to ask Meli de Bogotá a question about her own life, but until then I'm trying to enjoy the me-time.
It's been a good reminder of the internet's most effective use case, which, contrary to popular belief, is not facilitating the miracle of cross-cultural connection. Instead, it is a factory for inducing shame around the inability to remember the word “Thursday" in a language that is not your own.
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Another miracle: every DIY home improvement project I've taken on this year has been a success—because for any question I could possibly come up with regarding miter cuts or crown moulding, there is a man on YouTube who has already uploaded his life's knowledge on the subject. And chances are his name is Greg.
Greg will show you how to turn on your exact make and model of cordless sander. He will walk you through the differences between brads and finishing nails. He's deadly serious about safety, yet he truly loves to chuckle. If his name isn't actually Greg, it might as well be, and I prefer an older Greg, myself. No world exists in which he's the personality hire, but I respect that he's in it for pure love of the game.
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re: Personality hires, every instructor on Masterclass is the whole package: charismatic, accomplished, and mostly having earned the right to revel in their own mythology. God knows what they’re being paid (Rich Paul, Shonda Rhimes, and Esther Perel cannot come cheap), and it should be noted that the production value is exceptional.
I've learned a lot on the platform, but I'm more excited to tell you this: I googled Dan Brown after watching the “Writing Thrillers” session, and found an incredible 2020 NYTimes article about his very expensive affair with a Dutch horse trainer (and, subsequently, his very expensive divorce). Among other things, I cannot unsee the opulence of his “lawn fauna,” nor can I unlearn the existence of a $300,000 championship Friesian racehorse named “Da Vinci.” A truly compelling narrative.
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Is being fully in charge of our own time—and by extension, the keepers of our own syllabi of unmarketable skills—capitalism’s final boss? I fear we may never know. In a more just world, we'd all pursue our curiosity offline and full-time, but for now this is a luxury reserved for the very rich (and/or, let's be honest, the recently and erratically divorced). And let it be known! I have searched the glittering rooms of my heart and emerged enlightened: so long as there’s strong wi-fi for the rest of us, I begrudge these people nothing…except, of course, their ridiculously opulent lawn fauna.
“Hard Skills” emailed out 8.27.2025 with newsletter-exclusive extras. Subscribe here.