Fundamentals – learning the basics for the first time!

I am about to tell you something about ADHD that will blow your mind! You will think about it and just go … Dang, that’s true! Then again, you might go… that’s ridiculous, Bryan’s lost his mind!

One thing I have always been known for is that I am a very fast learner. No, I am not necessarily a fast runner, unless I am being chased, then I can get my run on pretty good. In the past being fast made me feel like I was better than everyone else, because, they were slow and then eventually and unfortunately, they would pass me for reasons I couldn’t understand. I hadn’t gotten any worse, I was still pretty darn good at what I was doing, so, why were these people passing me?! It was confounding I tell you! To make matters worse, these folks passing me could not do what I was doing better – what I could do was superior in every way! So, I have to slip this in here, please excuse me – WTH? (What The Heck?) That’s what would run through my head and I couldn’t solve the question. It was the most perplexing thing, it puzzled me to tears.

I received an email a while ago from someone who had read my book (“One Boy’s Struggle”) several times and for the very first time, someone was talking to me about something written in my book which no one had yet to mention to me! He wrote that I had solved his biggest, most difficult problem, it has driven him up the wall for years and then, seemingly out of the blue, he discovered a major problem in his life that was solvable! I am going to write the gist of it here for you.

In my book I talk about my pool/billiard career. I write about how good I became and how quickly I excelled to a high level, but, for some reason I stopped excelling, going forward and I even started losing to those I used to utterly vanquish without a thought. There are a few reasons for this, but, nothing was more important than one thing:

Fundamentals, the Basics!

I had never taken the time and consideration to learn the fundamentals of billiard play. The stance, the aim, the setup – I had always done all of this from ‘feeling’ and my gut instincts. Those feelings and gut instincts took me far, but, only so far. It came to the point that others who could not play at my level were eventually passing me in tournaments and in match play. They could not make many of the shots that I could, or, set up position with the accuracy that I could, but, what they could do was more important down the stretch. They had consistency through learned and practiced fundamentals. They rarely had the need for the ‘spectacular’ shots or pin point accuracy, which I had actually needed to compensate for my lack of fundamental basics in my play!

Once I got myself a champion ‘mentor’ or coach, rather, he took me back to the basics. Once I mastered a consistent stance, aim and stroke for my shots, it was, well, all over but the crying!

That’s the short of it. How many of us with ADHD are impatient and impulsive and skip steps in the learning process? We want to get there yesterday. And sometimes we get where we want to go fast, and yet have no real grip to stay there… ever wondered why? Perhaps, just maybe, some of the great fantastical things we learn to do are actually compensations for the things we haven’t taken the time to learn, or, didn’t know we needed to learn? Just imagine what you could do with those ‘great and fantastical’ things you’ve mastered, if you go back to the drawing board and learn the basics, if you haven’t already.

Consider the basics, fundamentals in what you are doing… how well have you mastered them?

~Bryan

PS: Even with learning the fundamentals, please don’t forget what else I clearly explained in my book about the mental aspect too, which, as we all know, is vital to succeeding at anything – however, skipping fundamentals, will not lead to consistency.

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