I think all skill based activities is done by mastering the basic and fundamentals first. Having worked in Silicon Valley I’ve found that some of the most impressive people are non-flashy and just have really solid fundamentals. I think it’s similar to minimalism and how less is usually more.

I guess some personal examples is working out. Most people want to follow some crazy workout plan in order to get stronger or whatever. But honestly doing pushups and squats is probably just as effective if not more than all them crazy exercises. In the context of starcraft… instead of learning fancy build orders or doing crazy micro. Just focus on macro. Macro is the basic skill that when mastered will get you the most bang for buck.

Since the only sport that I follow is the UFC. I remember reading the book got fight by Forrest Griffin. In it one thing that I still remember is that he said that a basic and solid understanding of the grappling positions is better than learning fancy submissions and escapes. Just having a solid jab/cross is more important than knowing how to do the superman punch or flying knee.

I think the problem is that mastering the basics is hard and tedious. You need a lot of practice.. and since it’s basic it’s hard to see improvements. Whenever you want to learn something new you want to hack the learning via blogs like lifehacker or whatever but in the end all the shortcuts end up as bad habits… just learn and master the basics and it’ll help out in the long run.

Since I’m currently learning how to shuffle… I’ve been mostly practicing the running man / t-step since those are the two basic moves. I always wanna learn more… but then I tell myself that by mastering these two it’ll allow me to be much much better.

tl;dr - when learning something new. focus on the most basic and important fundamental and master that. it’ll help the most in the long run