Just had an aha moment in IT, training some Level 1's, and simultaneously thinking about martial arts. Nothing revelatory, or even anything I hadn't subconsciously thought about already, but it's cool when world's collide.
In most martial arts, you're learning techniques first. Specific things to connect together, and to react to specific instances. As you get better at them, you start making them more flexible, and the end goal eventually is to understand the why of how it all works, so you can adapt as you need. Understanding why pushing someone at a 45 degree angle might have a different impact than a 70 degree angle, why you might step to the outside of one punch or inside of another, come in close/go out far, why you distribute weight a certain way, etc.
Even if I don't understand it for all arts, I know that there's some fundamental logic behind it that is the reason those specific things work.
It's the same thing for IT. When you start out, you're learning how to get specific printers connected, how to troubleshoot people not having internet, or not being able to open their mail. There's guides out for troubleshooting each of those based on your exact situation, that you can follow and 90% of the time resolve the issue. Then eventually, you get to the point where you notice similarities, and while you never worked with X before, you worked with Y and it's similar enough you can figure X out pretty quickly.
But there's also a level of understanding "This is how the network works, and if something is broken, it means somewhere along this connection it's not working properly", and being able to figure out the why and how of the fixes, rather than just the what. Which is the same level you're aiming for in martial arts.
In most martial arts, you're learning techniques first. Specific things to connect together, and to react to specific instances. As you get better at them, you start making them more flexible, and the end goal eventually is to understand the why of how it all works, so you can adapt as you need. Understanding why pushing someone at a 45 degree angle might have a different impact than a 70 degree angle, why you might step to the outside of one punch or inside of another, come in close/go out far, why you distribute weight a certain way, etc.
Even if I don't understand it for all arts, I know that there's some fundamental logic behind it that is the reason those specific things work.
It's the same thing for IT. When you start out, you're learning how to get specific printers connected, how to troubleshoot people not having internet, or not being able to open their mail. There's guides out for troubleshooting each of those based on your exact situation, that you can follow and 90% of the time resolve the issue. Then eventually, you get to the point where you notice similarities, and while you never worked with X before, you worked with Y and it's similar enough you can figure X out pretty quickly.
But there's also a level of understanding "This is how the network works, and if something is broken, it means somewhere along this connection it's not working properly", and being able to figure out the why and how of the fixes, rather than just the what. Which is the same level you're aiming for in martial arts.
