Never Give Up
I was training my son in Standing Grappling and Ground fighting just a few days ago and my youngest said, “It’s too hard, can you show me something else that is easier?” Of course, I gave him a hard time about it and continued to drill and drill. Later on, I sat him down and shared some of my life experiences where having a “Don’t give up” mental attitude literally saved my life. So, I thought that this thread might make a good blog post. Let me know what you think. I look forward to your comments and tweets.
Here it is:
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit. – Aristotle
How many times do we tell students “don’t give up”, but do we practice this mindset ourselves? When a challenge comes along and we don’t get it the first time, we should keep trying for at least one hundred times.
I have not failed 700 times, I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work
~ Thomas Edison
Think how successful we would be if we always did things one hundred times before we even thought about giving up. If this was put into our life at work, home and in martial arts, think of the things we could achieve. we might not even get there after one hundred times but think how much better we would be than just giving it one chance and then saying “l can’t do it”.
“Begin at the beginning,” the King said, gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”
Lewis Carroll
The human quality of perseverance is very important. Often people with physical talent fail because they lack perseverance and motivation, they should instead be like the proverbial boulder and just know we can achieve whatever we want, as long as we keep taking action and learning we can only go forwards and progress.
Repetition is the mother of all skills. To do a technique once and expect it to work for us is not true in the slightest. To really understand the technique and its concepts we have to do it until the line of familiarity and the root movement is in our subconscious. It can be done anytime anywhere without even thinking about it.
You may train for a long time, but if you merely move your hands and feet and jump up and down like a puppet, learning Karate is not very different from learning a dance. you will never have reached the heart of the matter; you will have failed to grasp the quintessence of karate-do – Gichin Funakoshi
Think how many times we do a jab in our training more than say a difficult kick, the jab is repeated far more times as the difficult kick will work in a real situation. It’s repeated time after time so that it will work for us in situations and we become very comfortable throwing it.
Given enough time, any man may master the physical. With enough knowledge, any man may become wise. It is the true warrior who can master both….and surpass the result.
~ Tien T’ai
When we have developed all of our combative skill sets ensuring that we adhere to the six attributes then our techniques will become technically sound and we will develop our tactical or strategic skills to become an excellent martial artist.
The obstacle is the path
~ Zen Proverb
Until next time, Let’s Get Training!
jim
