When I’m trying to learn something new—anything really, from physical skills to a functional understanding of an unfamiliar subject—much of my initial effort is focused on identifying the fundamentals.

This sounds like a simple enough process, but often the things that seem like the fundamentals are actually not: they’re basic aspects of the knowledge or know-how we want to learn, but they’re not foundational to our future pursuit of these things.

If I want to learn about design, then, I might be given some instruction on how to use Photoshop (and similar applications) and how to sketch out believable illustrations before committing them to a more usable (probably digital) format.

But the fundamentals of design are (arguably) actually things like composition, movement, visual hierarchy, and color theory; stuff you’ll tend to learn along the way, but not necessarily things that will be prioritized from the get-go, because looking at paintings and photography and gig posters to try to grok why they’re so pleasant to look at and easy to understand doesn’t feel like design—if you’re just starting out, making cool stuff in Photoshop feels like design.

I’m in the process of learning ballet right now, and a whole lot of my experience with ballet, thus far, has revolved around exercises and drills. I’ve been doing the same movements over and over, learning new stretches, and slowly figuring out how to move my body in unfamiliar but aesthetically optimized ways so that, moving forward, even more impressive feats can be accomplished.

What I’m coming to realize, though, now that I’m a few months into this practice, is that while these efforts gesture at the fundamentals (and definitely help prepare a would-be dancer to grasp said fundamentals when they’re eventually introduced), at a more essential level things like balance, coordination, and proprioception (a sense of where one’s body is in space) are a lot more core to a beginning dancer’s hoped-for growth than any individual exercise or routine.

This isn’t to say those exercises and routines are unimportant: it’s a good idea to learn to use the tools of our trade (like Photoshop), as these are skills we’ll lean upon daily for as long as we continue to perform this work (or do these dances).

But it’s important to understand the difference between a hammer and the knowledge of how to use that hammer appropriately (and which helps us recognize when we might be better served using a screwdriver).

Looking for and assiduously working to achieve/accumulate these sorts of underlying skills sets and bodies of knowledge can help us leverage the tools we acquire more skillfully, while also granting us the capacity to use other sorts of related tools, when warranted.

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