This strongly reminds me of a phenomenon I&#x27;ve witnessed on several occasions. I occasionally teach blacksmithing lessons and have found that new students can be pretty neatly grouped into two categories.<p>There&#x27;s the &quot;I want to be the blacksmith&quot; crowd. They are far and away the most common type of student to show up for one of my lessons. The defining characteristic is they have little prior aptitude and even less interest in the hundreds of hours of work required to develop strong fundamentals and build up a toolset. They&#x27;re perfectly happy to mash hot metal into gross approximations of a given shape and then post pics of the resulting catastrophe all over social media. They romanticize the mere act of tossing a chunk of metal into a fire and then hitting it with a hammer and are disinterested in end results.<p>The second group (maybe 1 out of every 10 students) are folks that want to make forged things and are concerned about achieving good results. These folks generally have some kind of background with basic tool use and typically blacksmithing isn&#x27;t their first craft.<p>I teach the same material to both groups but after about the third lesson there&#x27;s a distinct drop-off for members of the first group as we progress away from &quot;yay I make metal hot whack-whack-whack&quot; kitsch items like s-hooks and bottle openers and start getting into more serious work like making  simple hand tools and tongs. The transition from 15 minute projects that are functional even if they look like hammered cat shit to 1-2 hour long projects that have to be right to work at all is normally where the first group drops out.