Carry a heavy load on the right side of your body. Your body will tilt on its to adjust the center of gravity. It will do that whether you are an illiterate person who has never gone to a school, or a tenured professor of Physics. You don't have to understand how it works, for it to work. I am very glad for these inbuilt systems of the body. If i had to think about it, I would mess it up often and would be left marvelling at the people who keep shifting their centers of gravity so easily.
The kid playing cricket in street does not know the law of angular momentum or does not calculate the angle at which he should hit the ball for it to go the widest distance, he develops an intuitive sense about it by doing it alone. World's best cricketers attribute their excellence in the game to 'going by the feel' of the motion. But a case could be made that if the knowledge of how hitting a ball works in the world of Physics was imparted to them, it might have improved their performance even further. I mean, who knows?
The issue here is that It appears very obvious that knowing how something works will be likely to improve your performance, but it doesn't appear as much obvious to us that thinking about a thing too much can overwhelm you and can adversely affect your performance also. So in this case, a cricketer thinking too much about the mechanics of what he was doing could have easily backfired. To elaborate, I will borrow from the example of centipede dilemma.
There was a happy centipede going about its business of walking like a centipede when a toad asked him that marvelous centipede with an epic walk! can you tell me which leg you move first to initiate the motion and what is the sequence of movements for the rest of them?
The centipede trying to figure it out, got so exhausted that it became unable to walk and fell in a ditch.
Now, either you relate to the example of centipede or you don't. If you don't, then you are the one who is not as easily overwhelmed by information, has an ease in following many instructions at a time, and you are also likely to believe that the kid playing cricket will benefit from knowing the law of angular momentum. If however, you relate to the example of the centipede, like I absolutely do, then you will know that for some people, like our poor centipede, the sweet spot of good performance is not based on knowing or thinking more about what they are doing naturally.
The sharp contrast I have seen in myself with regards to this, is evident in the example of dancing. Ever if i try to mimic each body movement of a dancer, I end up making it look like a colossal failure and lose all natural elegance and smoothness. If i understand the movement instead, i can adapt to the rhythm even if i do not copy it to the T. I have objective evidence of it in the form of videos where I am performing clumsily in a choreographed dance vs when I am dancing according to my own understanding of the steps. An arrogant take away from this could be that I am not meant to follow the lead, but I am content with its more humble annotation : I have more difficulty in following instructions than other people, I take time to make sense of things, but when they do make sense and however they do, i can do them quite well and probably more deeply than the rest.
It's often said that you can't judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree. I have been that fish in environment of climbers too often. But now I take my time to understand and respect my own process of going about things.
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