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If you can kick butt, does that make you a martial artist? Not necessarily. If you seek to be an artist, you must first develop the palette. That means you can’t focus only on the immediate results of one tool; you need to think longer term.
Devon Boorman ·
I have found that people these days seem to be notoriously hard on themselves and are terrible at accurately assessing their own progress—I certainly have seen this in myself. Yet it is not an unfair thing to assess one’s progress as it can give a view into the effectiveness of your training. To do so fairly requires that you first have a few things in place.
Devon Boorman ·
Unless you plan to die ten years from now, there’s still plenty of time to gain a notable level of proficiency. Now is your only starting point. As scarce as it can sometimes seem, time is the one resource we can truly count on.
Devon Boorman ·
Any plan based on willpower for success is doomed. Success in anything is largely based on rhythm. The ability to take gradual and reliable steps toward your goal. Crunching away on the 10,000 hours of mastery is not going to come from a few good bursts of training, it’s going to come from a regular methodical practice over weeks and years.
Devon Boorman ·
Training is at least 50% mental and 50% physical. If you’re truly down-and-out sick, then just let yourself be sick. No sense resisting the sleep you need and prolonging the pain. But if you’re just out with the sniffles, or you have an injury that prevents you from physically training, then here are some things you can do to keep your rhythm going and train the mental side.
Devon Boorman ·
I want to get as close to the original martial art as possible without actually putting myself, my training partners, or my students in mortal danger. Yet that is a difficult thing. Without life and death it is difficult to not introduce excessive amounts of fallaciousness into your practice.
Devon Boorman ·
There is certainly something ingrained in our culture to get bored easily in repetition (I see this in myself and students). Our minds are hungry for variation, new challenge, and distraction. Activating the willpower to keep on task is often a losing battle, there is only so much will in the will-bank to activate in a given period of time.
Devon Boorman ·
Swinging a steel sword at someone, even a blunted one, seems risky. That's because it is. How can we keep practicing it—often rigorously—for a long time?
Devon Boorman ·
A study group is a group of peers devoted to helping each other get better in a particular martial practice. If you don’t have an experienced and savvy instructor in your area, or you want to pursue learning something that is not offered by your group or school, or you simply want to get in more training time than is being offered, a study group is a great way to go.
Devon Boorman ·
In its simplest form, practice is about identifying challenges, understanding them, solving them, and training through them. Then repeat. If you’re not failing, do it again. This time: up the challenge, up the personal risk, up the vulnerability of doing it wrong. Then repeat.
Devon Boorman ·
