There Are No Shortcuts To Long-Term Achievement

There are no shortcuts to long-term achievement. You either learn the fundamentals of your chosen craft and practice them diligently as long as you want to be excellent in your craft, or you will constantly be trying to build on a foundation you can't trust to do the job.

Hey there. It's me, Kore, and you're listening to Exercising Self-Control: From Fitness To Flourishing.

Now, when you're first starting in a new field, exploring options or unsure where to begin, it's best to take the simple, obvious, direct action. I call this the S.O.D.A.

Once you've gotten yourself to a point of commitment, you're done exploring and experimenting, and you have a clear direction, it's time to learn the fundamentals.

You put in the work to master the primary principles, skills, and systems, and you’ll earn the benefits of that for the rest of your life. But if you try to take a shortcut and you try to circumvent the reality of the learning curve, you’ll constantly need to work harder than if you had just put in the initial effort.

And that's not to say that you can't be smart as you learn the basics. It's a fine line between being smart, doing the smart things, and trying to outsmart the reality of making progress.

Most times, being dumb enough to do it the hard way is actually the quickest way to learn. After many iterations and an eye to always improving your approach, you'll be well ahead of the person who is still trying to skip to the supposed advanced techniques.

The effort some people put toward avoiding the absolutely necessary work of learning the fundamentals is wasted. If instead they did the simple, obvious, direct actions before them, they would find themselves advancing much sooner and learning much more than any apparent shortcut.

The hacks, the secrets, the backdoors are best exploited by those who have already got a firm grip on the fundamentals.

The motivation to find the shortcut is rooted in wanting to get to the advanced level before it's been earned. Any advanced level methods or techniques are built on a solid foundation of more fundamental techniques. Skimp on getting the basics handled and the advanced levels will fail anyway. Then it's back to work on the basics.

So do it right. Practice the basics in the beginning. Lay the groundwork for a solid foundation. Mastery is essentially a mastery of the basics.

At the highest levels of any craft (for example, music, sport, woodworking, juggling, art, public speaking, whatever) there are a variety of master practitioners. No two masters are identical. They put their own stamp on their craft. But look into the training history of these masters and you'll find a common foundation: the basics. They've taken the basics and built something unique on that foundation.

Take for example the differences between Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer, and Novak Djokovic. Each is a champion of tennis with their own unique style of play. Yet their fundamentals are on display regardless of the intensity of the match: balanced stance, court positioning, body rotation, weight transfer, grip.

What separates them is how they put the basics together, creating their style. Things like their strategy, their attitude during play, or their shot choices.

You can do the same. But not if you try to skip the basics.

That's it for today. Catch you next time.

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