Many online communities encourage rapid application. We are all under pressure to deliver results quickly. If this is the case, there’s the temptation to skip the fundamentals. But the deepest problems that we have with mastery usually involve the fundamentals, not the advanced material. What seems like a shortcut to mastery today will be the biggest drag on mastery tomorrow. What appears to be “getting ahead” today will appear to be “stuck in the mud” when complexity increases. That’s because you will need the fundamentals when things get complex.
The fundamentals aren’t just something that needs to be understood for their own sake. The fundamentals need to be understood so that the more advanced techniques make sense. If the fundamentals are weak, the advanced techniques will feel arbitrary and fragile. You may learn to do the advanced techniques, but you will have a hard time remembering them and a hard time understanding when to use them. This is because you don’t have the internal framework to make sense of them. On the other hand, if you have a deep understanding of the fundamentals, the advanced techniques feel intuitive and obvious. You have an internal framework to understand the advanced techniques, to know when to use them, and to remember them.
Skipping the fundamentals weakens our confidence. We build confidence early when we have early successes. If we achieve early successes by skipping the fundamentals, we may feel confident. But we are building a house of cards. Our confidence is fragile and will collapse when we encounter new and unexpected situations. We won’t feel comfortable trying new things. We will fear that others will discover that we don’t have a complete grasp of the fundamentals. On the other hand, if we master the fundamentals, our confidence will be more solid. We will feel more confident that we can handle new and unexpected situations. We will be more comfortable trying new things. We will be less concerned about what others think of us. We will be less concerned about others discovering our weaknesses.
There is a time and cognitive cost associated with filling in the fundamentals later. When we come back to the fundamentals later, we have to unlearn things as much as we have to learn things. And that takes time and effort. It will actually take more time and effort than it would have taken to learn it properly in the first place. What seemed like a shortcut to mastery took more time in the long run. What seemed like a shortcut to mastery resulted in a lot of frustration and confusion in the long run.
The fundamentals don’t require us to be obedient. But they do require us to be patient. They require us to slow down and think about what we are doing. They require us to slow down and think about why we are doing it. But in the long run, slowing down to understand the fundamentals is the best way to speed up mastery.
