[Help them move from "can't do" to "can with effort" to "effortless mastery", ideally skipping the second step.]
[Help them practice toward better outcomes by designing exercises that bring them within a session or two to 95% reliability for a small skill or task.]
[Through perceptual exposure, your brain is learning without telling you what it learned.]
[Good perceptual exposure training needs lots of high quality examples that seem different on the surface but aren't.]
[Ideally, the exercises don't explain but enables the learner's brain to "discover" a pattern.]
[A common theme when newbies get derailed is that they can't express their frustration to the product maker. You can at least acknowledge their experience and encourage them to continue or hint at what could make progress easier; tell them the struggle is normal and that it's part of getting started.]
[The manual's sin is not complexity but making people feel like they're idiots for not understanding.]
[Anticipate the faces they're likely to make and compensate for their inability to show you.]
[Find what needs compensating by looking in the top comments in discussion groups for the tool or its larger more compelling context.]
[Design a performance path with skills that motivate them towards mastery can also magnetize them away from derailers. Use existing paths based on training programs, discussion forums, or definitive guides. If you create a path, order skills from beginner (less time/effort) to expert and group by rank.]
[They need to believe they'll improve, then actually improve, and also realize they've improved.]
[The first thirty minutes is a critical period to support them doing something new or that they didn't know they could do: their first superpower]
[If they're worried about breaking something, they'll hesitate to touch anything. Make recovery easy. Help them feel free to just try things. Consider it a "Wild Experimentation Mode."]