Nobody is born haggling

Watch a confident haggler in the old market in Cairo and it looks like a gift.

She picks up a brass lamp, sets it down, asks the price of something else, laughs at the first number, names her own, takes two steps towards the door and comes back to a deal both sides seem to enjoy. The whole thing has a rhythm. The seller is almost smiling.

Then watch a first-timer. He asks the price, hears it, and freezes. He counters too high or too low, apologises, pays more than he meant to, and walks out convinced he is simply not the kind of person who can do this.

Both conclusions are wrong, and in the same way.

The first-timer is mistaking a beginning for a verdict. Haggling, like swimming or standing up to speak at a family gathering, is awkward until suddenly it is not. While you are bad at it, everyone can see that you are bad at it, and that visibility feels like proof. It is only proof that you have done it once.

The onlookers make the opposite mistake about the woman with the lamp. They decide she has a knack, a temperament, something in the blood. She does not. She has done it hundreds of times, and each round made the next one a little lighter, until the skill began to carry itself.

Being clumsy at it today and being hopeless at it forever are very different claims. So are being excellent at it and having been made that way.

We only tend to see skills like this at their two ends, when someone stumbles and when someone flows. The long stretch between, where all the improvement happens, goes unnoticed, and that is as true when the learner is ourselves.