Casting spells in the Vim language

For the past three years I used Vim almost exclusively to become efficient with it.
I wrote code, countless articles and documentation. Me and Vim we were ok till I watched this video and realized I had been living in blissful ignorance, relying on plugins, a 200 lines long .vimrc file that completely changes how Vim works, and bad advise given by people who know nothing about VI.

Please note that Chris Toomey is ‘flying’ through commands and concepts, which makes it quite difficult to follow for Vim newbs and regular users alike.