People with strong fundamentals don't panic
Yesterday I talked with my uncle, who works in Oman. He’s 60 and works in mining.
He told me how he trains his juniors, from the basics all the way to advanced. And one thing he said stuck with me:
“The ones with strong fundamentals don’t panic in the field.”
Basics first, in the mine
Whenever a new junior joins, he doesn’t hand them heavy work right away. He drills the basics first:
- The SOPs get read until they’re memorized.
- Safety procedures get repeated over and over.
- The basic tools get learned one at a time.
Not because he doesn’t trust them. But because in mining, one wrong step can be fatal.
Here’s what got me thinking. He said the juniors who get promoted fastest aren’t the smartest ones. They’re the ones with the strongest basics.
Because when they run into a new problem in the field, they don’t start from zero. They have a foundation to improvise from.
The same in the kitchen, on the road and at the office
I immediately connected it to everyday life.
Learning to cook, for example. Someone who understands the basics (how to cut, when to add salt, how to control the heat) can make any dish, even one they’ve never read the recipe for.
Someone who just follows recipes without understanding the “why” is lost the moment the recipe is different.
Or driving. Someone who learned to drive properly, who understands blind spots, safe following distance and when to use engine braking, can drive any car, on any road.
Someone who can only “make it go”? The moment they hit a new situation, they panic. Exactly like what my uncle said about his juniors in the mine.
This applies to office work too. Someone who understands the fundamentals of Excel (the logic behind formulas, how to think about data) can still adapt when they’re handed a new tool: Power BI, Sheets, even AI.
Because tools change. But the way of thinking doesn’t.
Someone who only memorized the steps without understanding why is back to zero the moment the tool changes.
Show them what happens if they skip it
Then I asked my uncle: “How do you get your juniors to want to learn the fundamentals? They’re boring.”
He laughed. “First I show them what happens when they don’t understand. Then they get serious.”
So it doesn’t start with “this is important, okay?” It starts with “this is what happens if you skip it.”
What I’m keeping
I boiled it down to 3 points for myself:
- Fundamentals don’t mean easy. They’re actually the part that most needs repeating.
- SOPs and rules aren’t bureaucracy. They’re the experience of people who failed before you, written down so you don’t fail too.
- The people with strong basics aren’t the fastest. They’re the ones who last the longest.
Sometimes we’re in too much of a hurry to get to the advanced stuff.
But people with strong fundamentals, in any field, don’t just survive. They can improvise.