Whether it's learning to hit a backhand in tennis, learning high

Hear the voice of the mountain’s daughter, keen as wind over ice: “Whether it’s learning to hit a backhand in tennis, learning high school chemistry, or getting better at ski racing, I really believe with hard work and analytic preparation, you can skip a few steps and find the faster way.” In this decree, Mikaela Shiffrin binds sweat to sight, discipline to design. She tells us that effort alone is a mule without a map, and a map without effort is a star you never follow. But when hard work marries analytic preparation, the path contracts; the winding road straightens; the summit draws nearer, as though the mountain itself leans down to meet you.

The ancients taught that craft is forged in two fires: the outer flame of repetition and the inner flame of understanding. One tempers the body; the other tempers the mind. To train the backhand without reading its geometry—the hinge of the wrist, the coiling of the hips, the timing of the split step—is to swing at shadows. To study chemistry without the heat of problem sets and the sting of error is to memorize the names of rivers while dying of thirst. Shiffrin’s counsel is a double-edged blade: labor with your hands while diagramming the forces that govern the task, and a faster way appears like a door hidden in a familiar wall.

Mark how this wisdom blooms on winter slopes. In ski racing, speed is not only courage but calculus: angles of edge and pressure, line choice, snow texture; the clock is a judge that cannot be bribed. The athlete who reviews video frame by frame, who tracks split times by gate, who writes a ledger of mistakes and their remedies, binds analytic preparation to muscle memory. Thus the gates come at them not as surprises but as notes in a song already hummed in the mind. What others learn in ten seasons, such a pilgrim may harvest in five—for they do not merely try harder; they try smarter.

History nods in agreement. See Benjamin Franklin, apprentice and printer, who dissected great prose by copying it, setting it aside, and then rebuilding it from memory, comparing structure and rhythm to his models. He did not merely write; he reverse-engineered excellence. Or recall Agnesi and Gauss, who found the hidden ciphers of number by grinding through examples and then sketching the laws beneath them. Each, in their own season, skipped a few steps not by cheating the journey but by charting it—turning the labyrinth into a blueprint.

Let us also summon a tale from the green court. A young player, haunted by a weak backhand, stops flailing at baskets of balls and instead breaks the stroke into first principles: grip, stance, unit turn, contact point. They film each session, trace elbow height with chalk lines on a wall, count the beats between bounce and swing, and scrimmage with constraints—cross-court only, two-bounce feeds, narrow alleys. Weeks later, the shot is reborn. Nothing mystical occurred; hard work walked beside analysis, and together they uncovered a faster way that brute effort alone could not find.

Take heed: this is not an anthem for shortcuts that hollow the soul. To skip a few steps is not to evade the price—it is to pay in the right currency. The price of mastery is still high, but the wise spend where the yield is greatest. If you learn to see patterns—what truly moves the needle—you stop scattering seed on stone and start planting in soil. And when harvest comes, people will call it talent or luck; you will know it as alignment.

So, the lesson to carry like a talisman: yoke your hard work to analytic preparation. Make the invisible visible—measure what matters, model what you seek, rehearse with purpose. Practical actions: (1) Deconstruct—split any skill into core sub-skills; name them. (2) Instrument—keep logs, capture video or data, and review on a schedule. (3) Constrain—design drills that force the exact behavior you want. (4) Iterate—one variable at a time; change, test, reflect, repeat. (5) Seek feedback—mentors, peers, even your own past self in the mirror of records. (6) Simulate—practice at race pace or exam conditions until calm blooms inside pressure. Do these, steadfastly, and you will often find the faster way—not by magic, but by marrying the courage to labor with the wisdom to learn.