It's About More Than Fighting; It's About Success

This is a picture of my teacher's teacher.
Definitely a believer in the mastery
concept, he won a national competition
in his 90's.

Years ago I was introduced to a concept that really changed not only the way I look at things, but the way I do everything as well. The funny thing is that this is a concept all of us are familiar with, in fact, it was a concept that is quite central in the martial arts.

The Concept of Mastery

Originally, when I was young, I thought that mastery of something was a destination. Mistakenly I was under the impression that to be the master of something was the goal. Don’t get me wrong, I was clearly raised to be a jack of all trades with a certain breadth of knowledge and a liberal arts education, but I always looked upon those who had reached mastery with respect and admiration. The closest to home for me were the martial arts masters; what skill, dedication and achievement they represented.

As I progressed within the martial arts culture and in a parallel way through my professional career, I was introduced to mastery not as a goal  but as a concept. The concept of mastery is not one of a destination, instead it is one of a journey. Mastery, I learned, is about constant improvement, openly working towards mastery of a skill. There is even an asian term for it 改善(Kaizen in Japanese) used in the Total Quality Management programs. When used in the business sense and applied to the workplace, kaizen refers to activities that continually improve all functions, and involves all employees from the CEO to the assembly line workers.

In martial arts, this is an apparent attitude. Focusing on the art, embracing it. This attitude clearly elevates the purpose of martial arts well above that of simple self defense, or fighting. One of the first mentions of this is in the Daoist writing s of Zhuangzi and Liezi in China. It is particularly noteworthy that this account clearly spells out the idea that practice of the martial arts can lead to an elevated state of mind where perfection of skill creates perfect mental focus, and does it centuries before the invention of Chan Buddhism (that practiced at the famous Shaolin monastery), in fact before Buddhism even reached China.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.
~ Aristotle

The book, Outliers, The Story of Success, is an attempt to dissect and study success. One of the characteristics common among all the super-successful individuals highlighted in this book is they are masters of something. From the biggest stars of professional hockey, through Bill Joy and Bill Gates, every single super successful person first had reached mastery of their chosen subject/field/art. So, it seems that applying the Mastery Concept is the 1st step toward success for all of us.
The next question facing us is how do we become a master of what we do, how do we embrace the concept of mastery? Again, from the book ,Outliers, written by Malcolm Gladwell, in essentially all instances, before the super-successful could reach success, they had put in a minimum of 10,000 hours practicing their art.

Secret Key to Mastery: Practice
I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times. ~Bruce Lee



We all remember hearing that practice makes perfect, especially if you are like me and had to take piano lessons as a child. The problem with that saying is that it is only a half-truth. In fact, perfect practice is what makes perfect. There is simply no replacement for doing something again and again and again. We can look at the recent Olympics for further proof of this. Two things are important to note here that were found in the studies that give us the 10,000 hour metric: 1. No one who spent 10,000 working and practicing hours failed to reach the mastery level. 2. There is a huge performance difference between those who don’t practice 10,000 hours and those who do.

As I mentioned earlier, I had originally viewed this mastery as a destination, and it certainly can still seem that way even with the given statistics. There is, however, something that happens during the 10,000 hours of practice other than getting really good at what you are practicing. A person changes the way they look at everything; they approach everything they do with a totally different perspective. Do you think any of these individuals got to 10,000 hours and said, ”I am good enough now”? No, during the 10,000 hours their perspective changes; they embrace the concept of mastery.

Embrace mastery, start practicing!

Rich on Google+