Recently I’ve been thinking about what it means to “go back to the basics.” The basics, the fundamentals, the building blocks—those elements of skill and craft that you have to master before you can move on to something harder.
Typically, once you have moved on, you don’t look back. You don’t revisit the alphabet in depth once you know how to read, or decide “today I think I’ll crawl everywhere” after you’ve learned to walk.
But the basics remain important, and in fact are often buried in the mechanics of the higher-level skill you use daily. One of the things I love best about my work is that aspects of it that used to take a lot of conscious effort I can now do without really thinking too much about it. So why would I think specifically about the basics? What’s the advantage?
For one thing, when we’re initially learning, we can’t quite take it all in. I was in school to become a certified coach almost ten years ago, and I studied theatre directing a lot longer ago that that! While I use some of what I studied all the time, l don’t use it all. In fact, there’s often a bias—I repeat the things I’m good at and don’t tend to get a chance to work on what doesn’t naturally go to my strengths. So while I may have mastered many skills, there are some that are still pretty much at the fundamentals level.
This becomes an issue when I’m faced with a different kind of challenge. If I were asked to direct a big musical, I would need to revisit the basics of directing in order to do it well. If I were coaching a client whose needs or personality were outside what I typically see, I would review some of what I studied in school.
And looking back at the basics is just good practice. When we’ve been good at something for a long time, we might get comfortable. We might not stretch in the same way, or hold ourselves accountable for new learning in the way we could.
What are the basics in your field? And what might you gain by revisiting them?
