Some blogs I write are intended to offend some. If you are doing things like trying to teach people through videos, acting like a boob in Japan, etc, then I want you to scream in rage as I take you to task.

This blog is going to set some people off, but many of them are one's I want to help. The truth sometimes hurts, and I hope that those that are worthy are brave enough to accept the facts. The stupid fucks that set themselves up as the head of their own styles are lost and quite worthless. All the truth I lay out will of course be rejected by them because they are complete fucktards. But I hope that those with good hearts won't reject what I point out, but try to figure out what to do from here.

This blog is inspired by the book "Talent is Overrated" by Geoff Colvin. I picked it up in my local library pretty much on a whim but it has managed to put into words a lot of what I have seen and felt over the years. It deals with how "natural" talent really isn't what makes people great. It is practice and effort. At the same time, he acknowledges that a lot of people do the same thing over and over again for years and don't get any better. The example he uses the most in the book is Tiger Woods, comparing him with the author's many years of playing golf and going to the driving range. He points out that far from being a natural born prodigy, Woods had a lot of help from an early age that he used to get where he is now. Certain types of practice, like the author's practice on the driving range, does not do much good. But some practice is the key to excellence. The entire book is devoted to showing what type of practice is needed for those who want to improve.

I can't do justice to the book in a blog, and I encourage everyone to go out and get their hands on a copy. You probably can find it in a library if your finances are low, but I suspect that many will borrow the book, read it, and then decide they need to buy a copy to keep for themselves. I myself have put it on my wish list at Amazon.

Here is a key section of the book that sums up what I want to point out. I believe that it is short enough to meet the "fair use" standards. It is hard to cut it any shorter and still have it have the same impact. Take the time to read and contemplate it, and then read my comments afterwards. It is from page 67 of the book.

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It's designed specifically to improve performance.

The key word in this attribute is designed. In the example of my pathetic routine on the driving range, I was designing my own practice activity, even though it's clear that Im completely unqualified to do so. The mechanics of hitting golf balls have been studied for decades and are extremely well understood by those who have made it their profession, but I have virtually none of their knowledge. It's the same in almost every field: decades or centuries of study have produced a body of knowledge about how performance is developed and improved, and full- time teachers generally possess that knowledge. At least in the early going, therefore, and sometimes long after, it's almost always necessary for a teacher to design the activity best suited to improve and individual's performance. In some fields, especially intellectual ones such as the arts, science, and business, people may eventually become skilled enough to design their own practice. But anyone who thinks the benefits of a teacher's help should at least question that view. There's a reason why the world's best golfers still go to teachers.

One of those reasons goes beyond the teacher's knowledge. It's his or her ability to see you in ways that you cannot see yourself. In sports the observation is literal; I cannot see myself hitting the golf ball and would benefit greatly from someone else's perspective. In other fields the observation may be metaphorical. A chess teacher is looking at the same boards as the student but can see that the student is consistently overlooking an important threat. A business coach is looking at the same situations as a manager but can see, for example, that the manager systematically fails to communicate his intentions clearly.

It's apparent why becoming significantly good at almost anything is extremely difficult without the help of a teacher or coach, at least in the early going. Without a clear, unbiased view of the subject's performance, choosing the best practice activity will be impossible; for reasons that may be simply physical (as in sports) or deeply psychological, very few of us can make a clear, honest assessment of our own performance. Even if we could, we could not design the best practice activity for that moment in our development- the type of practice that put us on the road to achieving at the highest levels- unless we had extensive knowledge of the latest and best methods for developing people in our chosen field. Most of us don't have that knowledge.

Whie the best methods of development are constantly changing, they're always built around a central principle: They're meant to stretch the individual beyond his or her current abilities. That may sound obvious, but most of us don't do it in the activities we think of as practice. At the driving range or at the piano, most of us, as adults, are just doing what we've done before and hoping to maintain the level of performance that we probably reached long ago.

By contrast, deliberate requires that one identify certain sharply defined elements of performance that need to be improved, and then work intently on them. Examples are everywhere. The great soprano Joan Sutherland devoted countless hours to practicing her trill- and not just the basic trill, but the many different types (whole-tone, semitone, baroque). Tiger Woods has been seen to drop golf balls into a sand trap and step on them, then practice shots from that near- impossible lie. The great performers isolate remarkably specific aspects of what they do and focus on just those things until they are improved; then it's on to the next aspect.

Choosing these aspects of performance is itself an important skill. Noel Tichy, a professor at the University of Michigan business school and former chief of General Electric's famous Crotonville management development center, illustrates  the point by drawing three concentric circles. He labels the inner circle "comfort zone," the middle one "learning zone," and the outer one "panic zone." On;y by choosing activities in the learning zone can one make progress. That's the location of skills and abilities that are just out of reach. We can never make progress in the comfort zone because those are the activities we can already do easily while panic-zone activities are so hard that we don't even know to approach them. Identifying the learning zone, which is not simple, and then forcing ourself to stay continually in it as it changes, which is even harder- these are the first and most important characteristics of deliberate practice.

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In this you find a lot of what I have been ranting about in my blogs and on the internet for years now. When I talk about how you can't learn Bujinkan from videos, the reasons for why can be found in the section above. When I make fun of self-proclaimed grandmasters and sokes and say that they are fairly low in their skills, you can see why they can't improve as well as a person still going to a teacher in Colvin's words. And a lot of ex-students of the Bujinkan really did not get as much personal instruction in Japan as they would like people to think and certainly are a dead end in terms of skill improvement since they stopped even pretending to go to class.

Lets face it, how much of this type of practice can we get? As much as it pains me to say it, the amount of people in the Bujinkan that can get this is extremely limited. I know of people that go to training with Soke Masaaki Hatsumi, but they do not get the rubbing of their noses in their mistakes like I got with the Japanese shihan. I have seen people go to training with those same shihan, and yet once things start getting outside their comfort zones they start going around "correcting" other students and trying to convince people to come to their classes later. At least one of my dearest teachers once looked at someone doing that and announced that the guy correcting instead of practicing was dead to him and not worthy of correcting the many mistakes he was making. How much correction can even the most sincere student get when he only sees their teacher in Japan for a few hours a year at best and they have to share the teacher with 30 or so others competing for attention?

One thing this quote does not mention is that this type of training really sucks. Having your nose constantly pushed into your mistakes is frustrating. I used to gnash my teeth on the way back from classes, convinced that I was being singled out for some reason, or that I was just not suited for the art. A few comments by my teachers saying that they were only being harsh with me because they saw the potential in me is probably the only thing that stopped me from giving up. One time, I mentioned to my (highly skilled) Japanese partner that I was "dame" which means "no good" in Japanese. He looked at me, and my favorite teacher came over and they told me that almost everyone else in the room was 'dame' but I was merely not yet skilled. I still remember that with a bit of fondness. I wasn't useless, but I didn't have things down yet. I might not be here if it wasn't for things like that.

I have been teaching for four years now. Before that, in all my time in Japan, I had no dojo and was content to merely learn as much as I could while I had the chance. Since coming back I have been able to contemplate on teaching and it is not all it is made out to be. I hear people say that teaching helps your improvement but I firmly believe that it is a lie we tell ourselves to make ourselves feel better about our lack of progress. Maybe I can vocalize the dynamics of something better since I have been teaching, but one of my teachers was quite vocal that true understanding of budo comes from the body and not the thought process. Learning is a sort of osmosis that you pick up through long hours of practice, the practice as described above. It is not thinking about it, being able to say how you do things- it is about doing it so that you no longer know how you are doing it anymore than a centipede can describe how he keeps his feet in order while walking.  Having a little old asian man shake his head sadly and tell you to do something differently is thousands of times better than showing someone how to do it.

My first Japanese teacher made a big point of pointing out the resident foreigners mistakes. The more you showed up to train with him, the more he would be willing to look at you with an expression that made you feel lower than a munchkin before telling you what you were doing wrong. He once pointed out that he was getting the same treatment from Soke Hatsumi. He told us to watch the demonstrations that went on in class as soke watched. He said (and I confirmed this with my own eyes) that the non-Japanese would be praised and allowed to sit down after they showed their version of what was shown, while a lot of the Japanese were scolded by soke and their mistakes made the basis of what was shown from that point. My teacher said, "If soke ever looked at what I did, merely nodded and said 'very good' like he does the foreigners instead of telling me what I was doing wrong I will probably go off in the corner and slit my throat."

As much as praise can lift your spirits, it is having your mistakes pointed out to you harshly that is the true path to getting better. Looking back in retrospect, I can say that the times I was the most frustrated were the periods that I achieved the most growth. It did not seem like it at the time. It was months of me trying something, failing and trying again and again while trying to find some inner secret I had been missing up to that point. Progress was not sudden, and once I started getting less frustrated with something and more familiar with it, new frustrations were trotted out by my teacher. Years later, I can view old tapes of me and see that I can now do things I could not do back then, but there was no sense of accomplishment at the time. Just years and years of being pushed beyond my comfort zone and all of my mistakes pointed out for me to work on.

How many of us can get this type of training? Let me be blunt, showing up for a handful of classes in Japan each year and seeing some moves just isn't enough. Where can you get the experience of someone screaming at you about your mistakes? If you look at some of the tapes of the daikomyosais in Japan, when something is shown a lot of people won't even do what was shown, instead coming up with their own variations. Do they think they know better how to improve than the Japanese shihan?

Even if you are not one of the ones who unconsciously do something different (and thus cause the teachers to give up on you in favor of those they think are trying), are we trying to pick up new kata, or get screamed at? If we put the question like that, everyone is going to say we want to get screamed at. But, is that what we are unconsciously trying for? Even if we try to get our noses rubbed in our mistakes, how can we develop a relationship with someone able to help?

It sometimes takes a lot for a skilled teacher to open up to people enough to become harsh with them. It is not that they don't care, but they see so many people who are only there to do their own thing that they hesitate to come down on anyone and have their help rejected in one way or another. Even those that go to class week after week for months at a time can be rejected if they are known to be teachers first and spend more time promoting their own class instead of doing what the teacher showed. My first teacher told me straight out that anyone who lived in Japan for more than a short while and did not get good in Japanese was obviously not trying enough to learn and thus was not worth his time. Most of the people living outside of Japan have a huge barrier to overcome in just breaching the gap with the Japanese teachers and gaining their trust. I don't have all the answers, but I urge everyone going to training with the Japanese to do their best in words and actions to show the Japanese that they do not mind being publicly corrected. They should ask questions like, "What do you think I am weakest at?", "What can someone with my habits do to get better?", or maybe "Can you show me something you think will help me the most?"

I know a lot of people will reject this because it threatens their views of the world and their abilities. It is not a conscious choice, but our brains work to protect our egos. Yes, I lived as a student in Japan for 15 years as a student and I got a lot of my mistakes rubbed in my nose. I know a lot of people will think that I am trying to promote myself as being better than anyone else. Well, I certainly am better than a lot of the idiots teaching in the Bujinkan and via youtube, but I do think others can get the same help I did if they only start thinking about it. I don't have the answers for everything, and I think everyone is going to have different circumstances and thus different answers on how to improve. But if we just accept that simple practice isn't enough to improve and start thinking of ways we can get the type of training Colvin talks about then we are at least going in the right direction and have a lot better chance of succeeding that if we had never had this pointed out to us.

As I said, the times I was the most frustrated were the times of greatest growth for me. So how can we try to be frustrated. Unconsciously, we probably work on what we are best at. We need to start trying to remember the stuff we had the most trouble with and make that the corner of our training. As Colvin wrote, a lot of things are what we ourselves can't see. So, even if we can't get a Japanese level teacher to point out problems, maybe we can get others who know us to observe and comment. It may not be the best, maybe not even enough. I can see one problem with that off the bat- those most eager to show off how much they know by “correcting” others are usually the ones that need to really STFU. A greater skilled person can give better insight, so at the higher levels as you improve you need better and better people pointing things out, and those people are damn rare in the Bujinkan now. But we have to what we can to try to get better and remaining in our comfort zone is not going to do it.

Oh, let me point the out now. If you are sitting back thinking that this somehow does not apply to you, then you probably suck big time. It is those that are thinking, "Shit, what am I missing?" that I think have the best chance of being great practitioners. Some will give lip service to this, and some will think they are doing their best but their unconscious is holding them back. It is not easy challenging yourself and what you believe, otherwise it would not be called "challenging" yourself. I honestly think that if we approach the problem thinking that we suck we are far more likely to get better than all those morons who join things like the World Head of Sokeship Council to show off how awesome they think they are. It is easier to believe you suck when a Japanese twice your age and half your size ties you up in knots on a regular basis, but it is not required in my opinion.

I wish all of you well and hope I have given you something to consider and use to push yourself to true excellence. We need good teachers in the martial arts, because the fucktards have a near monopoly now.

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