Down in the Dirt and the Weeds

Down in the dirt are where seeds grow. In order to cultivate a garden, you must first prepare the soil. In order to build a house, you must first set the foundation.

There's a lot of analogies you could use to say that foundational or fundamental skills are important. But when you're looking at building a new skill, starting a new hobby, or creating a fitness routine, the bottom line is the same:

In order to progress to the flashy stuff that gets people's attention, you have to spend hundreds of hours down in the dirt and weeds of the basics to build mastery. 

In my life, that means fitness and movement skills, but I think it is equally as true in music or art or working on cars.

It's easy to go on Instagram and see expert-level individuals performing beautiful skills. You can literally scroll all day and see hundreds of posts on handstands and cartwheels, digital paintings, or any number of awe-indpiring feats. But what is not visible is what is going on beneath the surface. Down underneath the dirt.

So what are fundamentals?

It might seem fairly obvious, but fundamentals are not always given the credit they're due. 

When you listen to a lead solo guitarist, you might think that to emulate them you just need to practice those complicated arpeggios over and over until you can repeat them flawlessly.

And that is certainly an option.

If you watch parkour, you might think that going out there, jumping between buildings, and trying to do backflips is how you build that skill.

I would argue that trying to improve by practicing high level abilities is the wrong way to go about meaningful development.

Here's why:

Let's go back to the analogy of the guitar solo.

Before picking apart that solo, you need at least some basic knowledge. You need to know what the notes are and have the ability to form the basic hand positions to play those notes on a guitar. That alone probably represents dozens or hours of study!

So let's say you practice enough to have the basic skill and knowledge to understand the structure of a guitar solo.

Then you go straight to learning the pattern of notes required for that favorite piece. One by one you learn the pattern of notes and put in dozens or hundreds more hours to speed it up, repeat it, and eventually you can approximate that solo.

You did it! You're a master musician, right?

Well, no.

Even though you've spent hundreds of hours so far, developing an affinity for a specific routine, you probably can't play other solos or create your own songs now.

Why is that?

That investment of time in still skipped a bunch of fundamentals. When, at the beginning, you developed the skill and knowledge of the basic hand positions and ability to read music, there are dozens of other fundamentals. Chords. Scales. Music theory. Composition theory. Progressions.

The same principle applies across the board: in order to perform at a high level of technical skill, a broad base of mastery over a lot of fundamental skills is required.

I think a lot of that comes down to perspective.

I'm going to switch back to physical development (a topic I'm much more versed in!)

If we look at bodybuilding, let's say, we can identify a number of recognizable patterns as fundamental. This would be basic lifts like the squat, deadlift, and bench press. If someone wants to get into weight training, these lifts are seen as an entry point.

But fundamentals aren't simply stepping stones to greater abilities. They're not just boxes to check off before moving down the list. A bodybuilder might do any number of highly specific exercises to target highly specific areas of their lower inner pecs, but they'd never tell you they "outgrew" the need for a straight bar bench press.

Why?

Fundamentals build intrinsic capability. Without a strong core, stabilizer muscles, muscle-memory for that pressing pattern in the shoulder girdle and elbows, doing other exercises won't have the same quality. That's what it comes down to. Fundamentals create mastery by creating a framework, creating a fertile and stable environment for growth. If your basics are very strong, the new skills will show it. They also create a familiarity with pattern that starts to have greater meaning in relation to other simple patterns. As the familiarity with those simple patterns grows, and your understanding of their relationship, you gradually come to your own natural expression of how those patterns can be put together or advanced to new patterns.

The seed has sprouted.

It might not seem like it at first, but spending a lot (and I mean a LOT) of time putting in the time, trying out the basics and seeing what does and does not work to transition, link, smooth out, slow down, speed up those basics leads to embodying that art. 

You can't pull on a sapling or yell at the dirt to make something grow faster. You grow the plant by watering it, watching it, culling away unwanted growth and competitive plants in it's environment. Similarly, you can't jump ahead to greater skill without attention, care, fixing bad habits, and proper rest.

You can try to go straight to the guitar solo, but you risk killing the plant or stunting it.

And everybody can tell if you're faking it.

So I encourage you to spend time in the dirt. Spend time on the basic stuff that nobody sees. Spend those hours to build control, understanding, and patience. All that time isn't spent on "basics", it's spent in growing a magnificent blossom.

Get dirty and enjoy your time growing.