In The Karate Kid, Mr. Miyagi has Daniel-San spend his first four days of training waxing his cars, sanding his floors, and painting his house. As Daniel-San is about to quit in frustration, Mr. Miyagi reveals that what he’s really been doing all that time is not waxing, or sanding, or painting, but perfecting the basic blocking motions, which are fundamentally important in karate.
The basics are never sexy.
In the sushi world, apprentice chefs don’t touch fish for months after they begin training. Instead, they do nothing but make rice. The reason is obvious, if you’ve ever eaten bad sushi: if the rice isn’t good, it doesn’t matter what else you do. You can’t have great sushi without good rice.
We seem the same problems in virtually every other field. In math, if kids don’t fully and deeply understand the basics, they won’t ever be able to do the higher level work that comes later on. In medicine, if you don’t really understand the basics of anatomy, you’re never going to be a doctor. If you don’t know how to read a decision, you’re never going to be a lawyer. If you don’t know how to properly structure a sentence, you’re never going to be a writer.
Too often, we skip ahead to the next step, without putting in the time to get good enough at the important thing.
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