I came up with a story that intuitively shows the difference of doing the seemingly exact same thing on different levels when I lived in the SF Bay Area - where I had ants in almost all apartments I lived in during the summer.

The story is about KILLING ANTS.

(Note: I lived in mostly peaceful coexistence with "my" ants - they had their roads through my living room and I ignored them, unless they started to crawl around my food. So no need to get upset, no excessive ant-killing took place in the development of this example.)

-----------

You kill a few ants in your kitchen. You can do that with your thumb or any object. However you do, it is a physical interaction between you and the ant(s). To kill more you repeat the same physical action. Killing one ant: one thumb press. Killing one hundred: one hundred thumb presses.

So the critical skill and the concrete action you will be doing throughout your ant-killing career is the "thumb press". Or if you use poison your skill is thumb pressing the spray can to distribute the poison.

-----------

Let's jump a few layers.

You become so good you attract the attention of the California governor. He puts you in charge of ant-killing in California.

-----------

QUESTION:

Will you do the same thing you did before, only more of it? A billion "thumb presses" instead of a few hundred?

Of course not!

You will never see or even touch a single ant yourself in your new job.

Instead of with ants you now work with a) humans, b) lawyers, c) regulations, d) logistics, e) statistics(!!!). You need to hire thumb-pressers, you need to organize poison - tons of it. You need to distribute the poison. You have to create maps and tell the middle managers where they should send their troops. You need to deal with absentees, internal politics, laws regulating work hours and poisons, people who were poisoned by your ant-killing troops because they misused the poisons. You need to collect numbers: Where were ants seen in the state? How many before the killing, how many after a week, a month, a year? Were the measures effective?

-----------

Compare the skills you need to control - kill - ants in your apartment or house with the skills you need to kill ants in ALL houses all over the state or country.

It SOUNDS like it is the same task - "kill ants". But human language is deceptive - 100% context dependent. "Scale" changes a problem completely.

If your ant-killing employees see any benefit at all in seeing you too kill an ant occasionally it is purely subjective "he's one of us", objectively each hour you yourself spend killing ants means you don't do your actual job of managing. It helps when you have past(!) experience - but joining your workers now really means that a) your are not doing your job or b) the problem still is low-scale (small startup - or, in the case of ants, even though you are responsible for ant-killing in the state there only are a handful of houses where there is anything to do).

-----------

Or another example, moving soil: If you need to move a tiny bit of earth you can use your hands. If it's a little bit you use a shovel - already you will no longer touch the soil directly. If you need to move even more soil you use an excavator - you now are even farther from the actual soil, and you need to know a lot about the machine, organize diesel fuel, spare parts, etc. If you need to move a vast amount of soil you get to the same problem as above, you don't even see the soil any more, you direct an organization, people, logistics, statistics, etc.