I was reminded of an important lesson last week when I had a new piano student start.

She bought a keyboard about a month ago. I asked her what she'd been doing in the time she’d had the instrument. She said she'd been learning a song. Before I asked her to play the song, I asked her to identify all the C notes on the keyboard, and she couldn't do it.

This is the very first thing that I cover in my first lesson with any beginner. I guide them through a process that allows them to learn all the note names and identify the keys on the keyboard within a few minutes. And then they practice it for the next week and it's locked in. This young lady had neglected to learn the fundamentals in the 4 weeks she'd been playing keyboard.

I then asked her to play the song she'd been teaching herself, and she couldn't do that either. She couldn't even orient herself at the keyboard to find the right notes to play.

The lesson here is that when most people fail, they fail at the fundamentals.

If you're not making progress, you want to ask yourself if you're failing at the fundamentals in that area.

We seem to have an aversion to doing the fundamentals.

There's an impatience. We want to get to the flashy, juicy, more advanced stuff.

But you can't go straight to the juicy stuff. You've got to learn the fundamentals that lay the groundwork for everything else.

If you're building a house, you don't start with the light fixtures or the marble benchtops or the stained glass windows. You start by laying a concrete slab. If you don't lay that foundation, the structure you try to build is going to be inherently unstable.

My student tried to build her house from the roof down, and it was completely unstable and fell apart. She had put the cart before the horse.

It's always a failure in the fundamentals. It's not because you don't know some trade secret or the latest hack or some nugget of wisdom.

Fundamentals are everything. If you can become great at the fundamentals, you give yourself a really solid chance of succeeding at almost anything.

The thing that's going to set you up for success initially isn't in the secret sauce; it's in the fundamentals. If you don't know the fundamentals in that domain, you need a coach.

I remember another student several years ago who saw me play at a gig and was so inspired that he approached me to teach him because he wanted to learn to improvise and solo. So we started lessons.

He was already a rudimentary piano player. It was obvious to me from my initial consultation with him that he hadn't really learned the fundamentals like which notes made up which scales, which chords belong to particular scales, which notes made up basic chords, how to construct chords, and how to move smoothly from one chord to the next; all of the things that would set the stage to be able to improvise and solo effectively.

He was really impatient and wanted to get straight to me showing him all of my killer solo licks and tricks. But he hadn't mastered the fundamentals, so he had no foundation to build those more advanced ideas upon, no context to really understand them and be creative with them and make them his own and fully integrate them into his playing. And he was so impatient that he left after about 5 lessons and never came back.

I see examples of this all the time, especially in dealing with musicians. I've got a friend who's been playing guitar for 6 years and she still can't move between certain basic chords effectively.

Unfortunately, this is partly a problem at a cultural level. In our current age of instant gratification, most people aren't willing to work on the fundamentals because they want the end result now, and if they can't have it in 5 minutes, it's too hard or not worth it. They want the hack, the shortcut.

You can't run before you can walk, and you can't walk before you can crawl.

This is an ideal place to apply the 80/20 Rule. The 20% of your effort that gives you 80% of your results is mastering the fundamentals and being able to execute them consistently and reliably with a high degree of accuracy.

What we’re really talking about here is competency, not mastery. When you learn the fundamentals well, you become competent.

Most of us are pretty ambitious. We want to be the best. We want to be world-class and impress people. To be world-class, you don't have to be world-class at just one skill. You can just be competent at it. When you learn a few diverse skills and become competent at each of them, then it's the combination of these skills that are valuable, rare, and makes you world-class. Combining those skills produces something truly unique that couldn't exist without each of the component pieces. But it all starts with the fundamentals.

This week, pick an area of your life that you’re struggling with or not making progress in. It might be your health, your relationship, your music, or your finances. Ask yourself: Am I failing in the fundamentals? If you are, you know what you need to do.