if a job exists, the task attached to it is difficult

I was reading an article about ‘makeup’ on Vagabomb.com. There was a nice line – “if a job exists, the task attached to it is difficult”. Then, I sent this one-liner to a friend. She din’t understand. So I’m writing this to explain what it means.

A bit of literature, why people should mind their own business and don’t be a jack of all trades

A single person can catch fish, grow crops, hunt, cook food and eat it too. But humanity was not just about surviving. It was about exhibiting the characteristics of an intelligent lifeform – in the form of music, art work, literature, architecture and aesthetics.

Now, imagine, if a single person could do everything on his/her own, we wouldn’t have had these roles. We would have ended with jack of all trades & master of none?

And, then, what if crisis came in? Most of us, are not Spartans. We are not warriors by profession (do check the link if you understand hindi). And, everyone can’t be war ready all the time. And, what if we did, then we’ll be known as a land of half life war boys. If we were just a land of warriors, we’d have been  gullible, aggressive and thoughtless.

We’d have been waging wars on each other and end up destroying the universe. Therefore, we needed a society that’d capable of thinking too.

( not cowards, ok, no Thucydides quotes here please).

Now, what exactly the master of the trade do

So, we, the humans, created specializations.

We needed people to call artists, scientists, politicians, philosophers, engineers, gold smiths, musicians, poets, writers, warriors, doctors, witches & magicians.

The artists creates arts, musicians create music and they sell/trade their art work for the basic needs. We needed politicians to represent us (ok, laugh at it), law makers who understand the people and write/amend the rule book from time to time, law enforcement agencies to protect the laws and citizens abiding by the law and punish who don’t. We needed prophets and spiritual leaders to teach us religion, basically another form of an authorless rule book that instills more fear than the law enforcements.

To enforce specialization, we introduced professionalization in every trade. That’d mean, that one has to work for years on something to gain experience and become perfect at it.


  • People worked on only one thing at a time e.g. writing, art work, software programming, music composition, poetry, or body building
  • They depended on others for the other forms of work
  • They started as unskilled workers
  • They get paid during training
  • They worked under someone’s supervision until they were capable enough to go solo
  • Then, the system rewarded them with a higher pay

This reward system will ensure they work even harder to become perfectionist. And, then they should be able to inspire others, and give back to the society by sharing the knowledge.

Now, is it easy to beat this class of people?

They have put many hours of constant effort to become efficient. An experienced coder will find flaws in a large system faster than a noob. A professional copy editor will take very little time for comprehension of a passage of text. What a professional artist will do in few minutes create on a canvas will be pure magic.

And patience – it’s great deal.

Body building takes years of hard work. A pianist takes years to develop his/her muscle memory.

It’s the constant push these professionals give every day in challenging the norms and making an extra 1% progress to exceed the standards that makes humanity prosper.

Therefore it is not easy to beat them. We can try getting better, and may be we’ll beat them one day. But it’ll require a lot of effort.

You can’t watch Youtube videos on rocket engines and make your rocket in the back yard tomorrow. You can’t just read techcrunch and become an entrepreneur. You can’t dribbble.com every day and become an artist.

Make up, though it isn’t rocket science, doesn’t make it any easier. It’s not for everyone.

‘Professional Makeup Artistry’ is not another hobby like gardening or jogging. A make up artist has attained professionalization in the trade by working many years in the trade. He/she has a job of making people look beautiful. The skills required to perform this job is hard to attain.

Therefore, if a job exists, the task attached to it will demand a lot of skill, hence the difficulty.

You can become an expert too, if you try everyday, constantly for hours, under an expert’s supervision, with the similar attitude. But, since you’re into a different specialization, you should rather refrain from buying those expensive make up kits which you do not know how to use.

I hope I’ve explained correctly.

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