Philosophy: These two ideas distinguish vim from other text editors:

1. Modal Editing: This is all about editing text efficiently. You spend more time moving through existing text and editing it than you do inserting fresh blocks of text. Navigation and editing is as easy as typing it fresh. Ignore the modes: think about giving vim commands in series
2. Operator Command Pattern: The commands that you can give vim follow a certain pattern.

For example:

1

d2w

Here's the explanation for the above:

1
2
3

d = delete operator
2 = two count
w = words motion