Fortify Your F*cking Fundamentals

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2025-01-18 12:30:09

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.

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.