Revisiting the fundamentals

[00:00:00] Well, hello. This is The Daily Five with Aurooba, that's me, where we reflect on creating our best lives a little bit every day. Here we go.

[00:00:16] How well do you know your fundamentals? Do you know them in a way that you can explain them clearly to another person who doesn't speak about them the same way you do? In what way do you know your fundamentals? Do you know them intuitively, like knowing when a sentence in your language isn't quite right?

[00:00:37] Or do you know them theoretically, where you can break down the sentence into its exact structure with exact terms and explain what's missing precisely? Both are valid, by the way. The English speaker who can break down the sentence into exact structure with terminology is as fluent as the intuitive speaker who can tell you something is off.

[00:00:58] Tell you how to correct it, but probably can't give you the exact terminology of all the different bits and pieces. This intuitive versus theoretical grasp of disciplines and their fundamentals often comes up in areas considered more creative, like art or the study of language, but it's equally valid in every other discipline and study.

[00:01:21] I'm a web developer, and I'm also formally trained on some of this stuff, but I will be the first to tell you that my grasp of development is first and foremost deeply intuitive. I'm unlikely to use technical terms when I explain many things, unless I absolutely have to. I will often explain things more simply. There's pros and cons to this, of course. You may accidentally leave out nuance or you may accidentally provide more nuance than necessary, but an exercise in considering these two different ways of understanding materials led me to think about how often we revisit the fundamentals in our disciplines, whether that's at work or not.

[00:02:05] The fundamentals of something may not change, but your understanding of those fundamentals is likely to grow and evolve. And revisiting them will not only strengthen your understanding, but also probably shed more light on them, now that you can look at them with all that extra nuance and experience you have under your belt.

[00:02:29] And this next bit might be more specific to software development, maybe, or the tech world. I'm not 100 percent sure, but sometimes when you're making lateral moves in your discipline, you often have fundamentals in one area which help you grasp something else more quickly and lets you progress to an advanced level without starting at the beginning.

[00:02:54] This is awesome, by the way. I do it all the time. But it can also be dangerous. Because you were able to get to that advanced level without starting at the beginning, you might assume the fundamentals of this new to you area are the same as the fundamentals you leaned on to get there. To some extent, this might be true, and to some extent, this might not be.

[00:03:20] The danger lies in never pausing to backtrack and visit those fundamentals and check your assumptions. That's, there's not always time, but sometimes there is, and taking that opportunity to think about the fundamentals when possible is a good thing. If you build a house on a solid foundation, you don't need to be constantly worrying about your foundation, you know, thinking, oh no, it's going to break down any second.

[00:03:47] But you do need to be alert and notice if any cracks develop in the foundation, or if something odd is happening on the first floor, then you need to visit the foundation and figure out if something there is causing the problem. In one of my family homes, the kitchen area was weirdly shaking. Every footstep would make the plates on the island rattle, and it was bizarre.

[00:04:09] We didn't know enough about construction, but we had an expert come take a look. It turns out, our builder had put in the minimum amount of studs. But because our kitchen area was particularly intense, that minimum amount was not enough to keep it super duper stable. We added another two studs, the fundamentals, and now we could walk safely into the kitchen without the plates rattling.

[00:04:34] So, I guess today I have a question for you. How often do you visit the fundamentals? And is it time to revisit them now? Some food for thought there.

[00:04:54] Thanks for listening. Same time tomorrow?