If you break anything down to it's smallest pieces, it's relativly simple. It's a technique that we have to use whenever we're looking at a large piece of code that we didn't write.. or even something that we wrote a long time ago. You break it down; figure out what each little piece does. I truely belive that a good portion of people can learn just about anything if they break the subject matter down.

There's two things that generally run counter to this though..

Lack of Desire..

Your desire to learn the meterial is less than your willingness to forgo the time needed.

Lack of Patients..

You're not patient enough to break down the problem. You want the enlightment now.

I work in a capacity that's less than well respected by many technology sub-cultures. I provide administration for NT/2000 domains/servers/resources. What I've deduced is that though a lot of the bad reputation comes from the fact that the products are produced by "The Evil Empire", the other half comes from the people that actually work in this capacity.

Like them or not, Microsoft has succeeded at making products that less than gifted people can (somewhat) support. The mentality that runs rampant among a good portion of my peers is, "Just tell me how to fix it." and "Oh, that's to complicated."

The unfortunate part of the "admininstration made easy" aspect of Windows products is the fact that it's lowered the admission bar not only for ability, but also for desire. The desire for most is a better paying job; "Hey, I can make more money working with computers!" But there's no passion for technology. Are most of them smart enough to really learn what's going on? Probably. Do they have the desire? No. So they view everything as "too complicated" and "for those techo-geeks", when in fact they could more than likely learn the subject matter quite well.

Anyway.. that probably dragged on too long, but the point is that "it's too complicated" or "I'll never be able to learn that" is rarely a true assement. It's usually the case that there's no desire and/or a lack of patients.

-Rich