Fortify Your F*cking Fundamentals

Skating around the rink will get you to a decent level of comfort in your basic skating skills, but being able to land jumps and spins will force a whole new level of robustness and fault-tolerance in those underlying skills. The same applies to knowledge in general.

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To have enough mental bandwidth to think deeply about what’s going on in physics or any math-heavy field, you need to be very comfortable executing the underlying math. And that’s not going to happen if the math you need is close to the edge of your ability.

Sure, you can execute it… but not comfortably, and that makes all the difference. Your high-level train of thought is going to get continually derailed by the low-level details of the math you have to do. You’re going to have a hard time seeing the forest for the trees.

To hammer in your math skills to the point of comfortable execution, it helps to not only get plenty of practice with those skills, but also layer plenty of more advanced skills on top.

This “layering” phenomenon isn’t unique to math. It happens everywhere.

For instance: figure skating. Yes, figure skaters get really good at skating in part because they skate a lot, but it’s not just that. It’s also that they continually layer more advanced jumps and spins.

Skating around the rink will get you to a decent level of comfort in your basic skating skills, but being able to land jumps and spins will force a whole new level of robustness and fault-tolerance in those underlying skills.

It’s like those robot testing demonstrations where all the engineers stand in a circle shoving the robot around. It’s not enough to just test that the robot can follow a predetermined path. You gotta bang it around a bit to make sure it’s resilient.

It all comes down to forcing structural integrity of underlying skills.

When you build advanced features on top of a system, they sometimes fail in ways that reveal previously-unknown foundational weaknesses in the underlying structure. This forces you to fortify the underlying structure so that the system can accommodate new elements without compromising its integrity.

And when you fortify the system to execute advanced tasks successfully, it becomes capable of executing simpler tasks comfortably.

What’s more, fortifying the underlying structure often requires improving its organization and elegance, which, in the context of student knowledge, is what produces deep understanding and insight.

TLDR: Fortify your f*cking fundamentals.

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