Back to the Fundamentals

Yesterday was my first day of my dive certification course. We spent two hours in a classroom covering information we needed to know before even stepping in the water. We then spent another hour on the boat talking through our equipment, and the skills we would start practicing underwater. Then we spent an hour under very shallow water. We practiced only two skills. The first was breathing through our regulator, taking the regulator out of our mouth, putting it back in, clearing it of water and continuing to breathe. The second was filling our masks with water, and clearing the water out of our masks through our noses so we could see again.

In my first drum lesson, my teacher showed me a chart with 40 rudiments (sticking rhythms). My practice over the first few months consisted almost strictly of learning no more than four or five of these a week until I had learned all of them. After weeks of strict rudiments, I learned one simple rock beat, and practice became learning three or four of very similar beats each week, while continuing to work on my rudiments.

When I started playing baseball, I started by hitting a ball off a tee. A few years later, I moved to soft toss. It wasn’t until four years after I started playing that I hit live pitching for the first time. Even still, all throughout high school, I spent many hours standing in front of a tee hitting into a net.

In each of these cases, I started by learning fundamentals. I didn’t get to move on to the next step until I had mastered (a term I use loosely here) the previous one. It’s easy to recognize the value of moving slowly through the fundamentals in hard skills, but it’s easy to miss the value in slowing down and intentionally focusing on fundamentals in other areas of our lives.

Case Study: Conversations

Let’s look at conversations as a simple example. There’s a book called “How to Talk to Anyone: 92 Little Tricks for Big Success in Relationships”. Unsurprisingly, it’s a book with 92 short chapters, with each being a tip or tool to use for better interaction with others.

Now, how would you approach reading this book? Let’s look at two different approaches.

Person one, let’s call him Mark, reads the whole thing at a quick pace of 10 chapters a day every day for a little over a week. Along the way, several chapters stand out to him, but he moves right along. By the end of the book, Mark probably has a handful of tips that he somewhat remembers in his brain. The book goes back on the shelf with no intent of consistently referencing it. Each new conversation he has, he tries to remember everything from the book, maybe remembers a few different tips each time and practices his conversations when he happens to remember.

Person two, let’s call her Lydia, reads two chapters once a week. It’s going to take her nearly a whole year to finish this single book. But Lydia does something differently than Mark. The week after she reads her chapters, she sets a goal of having ten conversations to practice just those two tips. By the end of each week, those two things become muscle memory as she internalizes them.

Over the long run, who is likely going to be the better conversationalist? I’d bet on Lydia.

Variables

I’d argue there are three primary variables that determine how successful we are at internalizing knowledge and successfully transforming it into application. Those three are Volume, Speed, and Intentionality.

Volume

A few nights ago I ordered both Pad See Ew and Massaman Curry. I was hungry, and thought I’d be able to finish it all. I made a good effort, but there was no way I was finishing all of the food in front of me. My eyes were much bigger than my stomach was that night.

We often do this in the way that we approach learning new information or practicing new skills, and in this instance, it’s much harder to tell when we’ve “eaten” too much. We try to tackle too many things at a time which leads to spreading our mental resources too thin and suboptimal application. Simply intaking information is a long cry from digesting and applying that information, and we think we can digest more at one time than we really can.

Look at multitasking. There are very, very few instances where multitasking is actually more productive that focusing on a single item at a time. As much as we try to convince ourselves that we can multitask, our brains just aren’t good at it.

What if we quit multitasking in what we want to learn and grow in? What if we limit ourselves to focusing on a single item at a time, playing and experimenting with it until we really understand how it operates and how to use it?

Speed

Nobody likes being behind a car going five miles under the speed limit. But learning isn’t the same as driving, and your personal learning doesn’t impede anyone else’s. It’s not a race. In the context of learning, slower is better.

Moving slowly is boring. Moving slowly is also effective. It requires patience and the ability to accurately assess whether you’re ready to move on to the next step. We live in a culture abundant in instant gratification, and this makes it even more challenging to slow down. (I want to be better at conversations tomorrow, not a year from now!)

Nearly 80% of drivers believe they are above average. Some quick math makes those numbers questionable. Generally speaking, people have an overinflated perception of their own skills and ability. We hit five balls off a tee and think we’re ready for live pitching. Then we get on the field and find out we were very wrong as we whiff through every single pitch.

To fully internalize a concept, we must fight against the urge to think that we are further along than we are. Moving slowly is not an issue as long as we are continuing to move forward. We can fast-forward the clock to where we see ourselves tomorrow, maybe next week, but the further out we try to project, the harder it becomes. I’m a big fan of James Clear’s book Atomic Habits. A primary concept he discusses is the impact of small habits when projected far in the future. It’s easy to make a one percent improvement in a moment. It’s a lot more difficult to make a fifty percent improvement overnight. But when we are consistent in our one percent improvements, over time we will eventually be miles away from where we started.

Intentionality

Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect.

– Vince Lombardi

He’s not wrong. Successful practice is never haphazard. Haphazard practice might make it feel like you’re moving quickly, but it will always end up being less effective than slow, intentional practice of the fundamentals.

If you want to get better at conversations, don’t wait for someone to talk to you. Talk to three new people every week with a goal of asking three open ended questions in each. If you want to improve your ability to step outside your comfort zone, don’t wait for your friend to invite you to the improv lesson. Do something you wouldn’t normally do every Friday night. If you want to have a better mindset towards conflict with your partner, don’t wait for a massive fight. Start practicing the language you want to use in small, inconsequential moments so that when the impactful ones come you’re better prepared.

Running through a script in your head is not at all equivalent to practicing a skill (well, okay, there’s some research about mental rehearsal actually being effective in sport & some other hard skills, but that’s not exactly what I’m getting at here). This applies to any skill in the context of relationships of any form. An interaction is made up of more than one party, and sooner or later the other person will deviate from any script you try to create.

All this I say to myself as much as I say to you. I have a strong tendency to try to play the script game, and I end up spending an immense amount of energy trying to predict behavior that I rarely guess correctly anyway. (And more often than not, I have a worse expectation of how someone will respond in a situation than they do, which ends up not being fair to place on the other person.)

Ditch the scripts and engage with open hands. Evaluate live and play the film back later. But don’t hang on the errors from a state of dread, simply treat them as adjustments to make for next time.

Creating Fundamentals

So what areas of your life do you want to improve? What do you want to internalize? How do you want to interact differently with people? Who do you want to be, and what are the gaps you see between you and them? Make a list, but then only pick one. The others can wait. You have time.

I’d say if you found an area, there’s probably no shortage of books, podcasts or other content to help you break that area down into fundamentals. Or maybe just talk about it with a friend or partner and brainstorm together (this has the added bonus of providing some accountability along the way). Or, if you want, send me a message and I’d be happy to talk through it with you.

Once you feel like you really have it down, then you can move onto the next one on your list. Hopefully by this point you’ve put in enough intentional practice for the first one that it’s much closer to being automatic. The goal is lasting change, and if it’s not automatic, it’s going to be much easier to lose later on.

Closing Thoughts

A few final things I want to note before I close.

1. This isn’t a competition. It’s not about anyone else but you. Look at others you admire for inspiration of where you want to be, but don’t compare your ability level with theirs.
2. Give yourself grace. You must allow yourself to be bad at something before you become good at it. If you want to practice conversations, you must be willing to subject yourself to having some terrible conversations with people (and remember that a conversation is a two way street, so it’s not that you are just bad at conversations). If you want to practice how you approach conflict, there’s a chance you swing the pendulum the other direction before you find the middle. It’s not always about the outcome, it’s about the reps, evaluating those reps, and making adjustments for next time.
3. I briefly touched on accountability earlier, and want to reinforce it. Let someone else in you trust. There is power in community. Especially if there is something you want to practice in the context of a specific relationship, let the other person know about it, that way you can approach it together as a team and they can be prepared for some reps that might not go exactly as planned.
4. Doing new things is uncomfortable and scary. Over time I’ve learned that a lot of the situations that I’m afraid of aren’t really that bad if we let go of the idea that an outcome we fear says something about our identity as a person.

Thanks for being here.