It came when I was in the squat rack.
Gasping for air, slicked with sweat, muscles tense and burning.
A revelation: every major step forward in my life has come about from a return to basics.
Every plateau came from attempting to advance before I was ready.
In the gym
I got out of the habit of keeping a workout notebook.
Look around the gym. You don’t see anyone else with a pen and paper recording their sets and reps.
I got self-conscious, complacent, and cocky. I know what I’m doing. Why do I need to keep recording this shit?
New year:
- Return to basics. I busted out the notebook and started keeping track of each workout.
The philosophy:
- Each workout, look back at the previous one and beat it. One extra rep. An extra couple of pounds. An extra set. A more challenging exercise. Make it small but make it.
Fat blitzed off my midsection. Muscles blew up. Face leaned out. Endurance shot up.
Then I started to fool myself again.
I was adding more and more weight on the squat bar but my legs couldn’t go below parallel.
How long am I really gonna fool myself?
I immediately ditched half the weight. New goal. No showing off. Let the silly boys crashing the weight up and down on the assisted bench do that.
I was going to stay right around the weight that lets me put my ass to the ground.
It’s not impressive. But the more I drill that baby weight, the stronger I become. I stay flexible. I avoid injuries. My body responds. People stare in the gym – why the fuck is that big dude using such tiny weight?
In learning Japanese
My girlfriend looked at me doing Japanese grammar homework.
“Why are you doing all this advanced stuff when you haven’t completely nailed the passive and causative forms?”
She was right.
The passive and causative are fundamental grammar principles.
They are the bedrock upon which whole chunks of understanding and communication are founded.
Imagine you’re learning to cook:
- Why would you start dicking around with advanced culinary techniques like engastration and pellicle if you haven’t mastered basic flavour profiles?
Do you understand how to use salt and pepper?
No? Then stop messing around with the Bernaise sauce and bust open that box of Maldon.
I spent months learning the wrong stuff in the wrong order in Japanese.
I’d learn reams of JLPT1 vocabulary (the high-tier stuff you only need to know if you read and write technical academic papers) and neglected basic grammar like the te-form, which opens up a whole world of possibilities of expression.
When I drilled the basics, my comprehension took a leap forward.
So now – even though I feel like I understand it, even though it makes me feel like a baby – I’m putting aside the advanced Japanese grammar books.
I’m going through a big list of verbs and I’m drilling the shit out of the causative and passive forms every single day.
- 怪物に食べられちゃった。今お腹にいる。
- 俺が弟に腐ったソーセージを食べさせた。
- 二匹の猫にやらせる。暇だから。
Come on. All together now. Let’s bust out those herbs and get those flavours popping.
At Oxford
I was floundering in my final year at Oxford University.
Suckers in head office wanted me to take a year off and get my head together.
I was like, “Bitch, please. If I do that, I won’t come back.”
So they assigned me a mentor – a kind intelligent PhD student called Mark – to meet with me once a week to discuss my essays and dissertations and help me improve upon them.
Every week I turned up at the coffee house ready to discuss high-falluting bullshit over a mocha and croissant – stuff that would make a polytechnic student’s head spin…
But what did I get?
“Ben, you’ve haven’t peed on your work…”
Ah, this basic crap again.
But it wasn’t crap. It was gold.
PEE stands for:
- Point
- Example
- Explanation
It’s how you structure your central thesis, your paragraphs, your life.
It doesn’t matter how good your argument is, if you can’t express it coherently, it’s nonsense.
So you have to go back to basics and learn how to write.
I spent my final year studying English Language and Literature at Oxford University drilling a writing exercise they teach ten-year-olds:
Point, Example, Explanation.
Over and over again until I started producing first-grade essays.
The basics worked.
Forget the complicated stuff for now.
Maybe forget it forever.
Just nail the basics and you’re golden.
Drillers are killers
That’s what the BJJ guys say:
Drillers are killers.
And you know what Bruce Lee said?
‘I fear not the man who has practiced 10000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10000 times.’
And you know what the Japanese zen masters said?
塵も積もれば、山となる.
Even dust piled up becomes a mountain.
So drill until you can kill.
Practice that one kick a thousand times.
Pile that dust up until it becomes a mountain.