The standard story is that decrease in requisite effort is enabled by skill. As in, "It's easy to try to do anything, but that doesn't mean you'll succeed. Skill is what turns effort into success."
Sometimes, sure.
But a lot of the time it's actually really hard to try, and then once you do the thing itself is easy. "I'm trying to hit the target, but it's hard! I can't stop flinching!" — nah, you literally aren't trying. The skill is in trying. The skill is often in the trying. It's not easy to hold intention on the right things, at the right times, or even to notice when we're not.
Okay, sure, old news. What's the new piece?
The old piece is that the guy trying for months to overcome a flinch isn't trying to hit the target, and is orders of magnitude too slow because he is conflating "trying to stop flinching" with "trying to hit the target".
The new piece explains why he succeeds at all.
It helps to explain why CBT can work at all, given the fact that the premises are nonsense.
And it also explains part of why staying target focused is hard.
In "Aiming with proper aim", I talk about how even GOAT level pistol shooters find it hard to stay target focused, and how taking their advice to try to focus on a small spot on the target can lead to the exact opposite result.
What's happening here is that they're trying to hold intention on hitting the target. That's actually trying! Which is why it works at the elite level! But... it's also deliberately accepting known wrongness. And that's hard to do, because when you keep saying "The dot WILL be right on target!", reality keeps saying "Nah bro. Not quite". So you keep shutting it out, keep shutting it out... And it's fatiguing. It's hard to not notice continued wrongness. Try as you might to exert your will top down, you eventually fatigue. Bottom up gets credibility from real data, in endless supply, while your ability to leverage your say so on fiat runs out of credibility. So you struggle, and fail, and truth leaks in despite your best efforts to not let it.
So you learn, and get better.
And eventually learn that you're safe, despite trying to insist that you already are and have nothing to learn. Eventually learn that you're happy to accept the recoil, and try to hit the target. Despite trying to push the story that you've been "trying to hit the target" all along. You try try try to stop flinching, and fatigue precisely as fast as you fatigue away your ability to try. Because effort blocks learning and all that.
The standard story is often exactly backwards. It's not that decrease in effort is enabled by increase in skill. Increase in skill is enabled by lack of effort. Because trying blocks learning and all that.
The new piece is that often the load bearing piece, which drives how much we learn at all, is that we fatigue away our ability to try. And, once we stop trying to do stupid shit, we can begin to learn effortlessly.