Mastery Through Embarrassingly Basic Drills | Generated by AI
English Translation & Explanation of the Post
This is a Weibo post (Chinese Twitter-like platform) written by a computational scientist / programmer who also loves tennis and drawing. The core idea is a profound insight about true learning and mastery: the most effective way to fix advanced problems is almost always by going back to ridiculously simple, “embarrassingly basic” drills that most people (and most teachers) skip because they feel too childish or trivial.
Literal Translation (slightly polished for readability)
“I wasn’t planning to get a tennis coach, but somehow I met a great hitting partner who recommended one to me — a guy who majored in tennis at university. I took one lesson today and was blown away by how good he is.
The coach immediately spotted several flaws in my strokes. Then he had me do tiny little drills, for example: he would lightly toss the ball by hand, and I had to return it with maybe 10% power — so softly that he could catch it with his bare hand — using exactly the corrected technique he just showed me. From that ultra-slow exchange he could instantly see which old habits were still creeping in.
I had never in my life hit a ball with so little power during practice. This is completely different from the coach I had in the UK two years ago — that guy injured my shoulder by feeding me super-heavy balls from day one and never once made me do anything this basic.
Of course, since I can already rally and even play matches, these drills would be way too advanced for a total beginner. So whether something is “basic enough” is relative to the student. But what shocked me is that these almost laughably simple, low-power exercises — the kind most people would dismiss as not worth doing — produced dramatic improvements.
While he was correcting me, mechanical principles and explanations kept popping into my head. I understood everything he said almost instantly, and later on the way home I could mentally replay the entire lesson and keep practicing in my head. I realized: my entire tennis life just changed in one hour.
This coach’s teaching method is exactly like the introductory computational science course I teach: you start from the absolute fundamentals. If a student still can’t do it, it almost always means the exercise you gave them is still not basic enough for where they actually are.
Every discipline can be learned this way — music, painting, everything. When I learned realistic drawing years ago, a few truly fundamental exercises improved my work by leaps and bounds.
Most domestic (Chinese) drawing education fails precisely because teachers never start from the real fundamentals. What is the real most basic exercise in pencil drawing? After years of experimentation, I discovered it is this: take a 2 cm × 2 cm square and fill it completely black with pencil — perfectly even tone, no visible lines, no streaks, no lighter spots. That’s it.
What do Chinese art teachers usually teach as “basics”? The hated “parallel line hatching” (排线). That’s exactly why students’ drawings end up looking stiff and lifeless.
I’m not saying Western art education is better — it’s mostly the same problem. Almost nobody does these truly foundational exercises anymore. This is why modern painters simply gave up on realistic rendering ability and started painting like Van Gogh’s “ghost scratches” and then called it “art.” 😏”
Core Message (the author’s big insight)
Real mastery in any skill (tennis strokes, programming, realistic drawing, piano, etc.) is built on top of microscopic control of the absolute basics. Most people and most teachers jump too far ahead, so bad habits get baked in forever. The moment you force yourself (or are forced) to practice at 5–10% speed/power with perfect form, all the hidden flaws become glaringly obvious, and fixing them becomes ridiculously easy.
The 2 cm × 2 cm perfectly even tone block is the drawing equivalent of the coach catching the ball with his hand: it looks childish, but it trains pressure control, angle control, pencil grip, stroke consistency, and visual feedback at the most fundamental physical level. Once that tiny square is perfect, everything else (shading a sphere, a nose, a whole portrait) suddenly becomes possible.
In short:
“If you’re stuck at an intermediate or even advanced level, the solution is almost never ‘try harder’ or ‘do more advanced drills’ — it’s ‘go back to an exercise so basic that it feels stupid, and make it perfect.’ That is the universal cheat code for breaking plateaus in any skill.”
The sarcastic last sentence about modern art is just the author’s typical dark humor: he believes a lot of 20th-century and contemporary art abandoned technical mastery of tone and form (which requires those boring basic exercises) and re-branded lack of skill as artistic expression.