How do you explain a generational player like Wayne Gretzky?
I remember thinking how his approach to playing the game was so "unusual."
Unusual ... and unusually good.
Even then he was so unbelievably creative. It was as if he'd learned the game on another planet.
He seemed to be the very definition of "thinking outside the box."
Gretzky's fundamental skills were unmatched.
Like so many others, I admired the Great One's prowess as a player, while at the same time being a little baffled by it.
Over time, however, I came to appreciate that Gretzky's genius was his ability to be creative from within the box.
Hockey was still hockey after all.
And I soon came to realize that all of Gretzky's "magic" stemmed from his unbelievably solid fundamentals.
Here's a partial list of Gretzky's attributes as a player:
Gretzky's creativity depended on his fundamental skills.
The first four of those attributes are all "fundamentals-based."
Only the last attribute truly reflects his uncanny ability to "think outside the box."
Yet, reflecting on his amazing career (and with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight), it's obvious to me now that Gretzky never could have developed his other-worldly hockey sense without first having developed his unbelievably solid fundamental skills.
What lesson can we take away from this?
If there's a lesson to be learned from Gretzky, it is this:
Creativity might come from "thinking outside the box," but in order to "effectively" think outside the box, one must first master the fundamentals.
And to master the fundamentals (on which creativity depends), one must first be able to think "inside the box."
After all ...
Hockey is still hockey. Hockey's fundamentals are still hockey's fundamentals.
(For a very interesting and more general treatment of this topic, see "First, Think Inside the Box" by Christopher Peterson, PhD, a brief article from 2010 that appeared in Psychology Today.)
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