You're running so fast, you're so smart and quick, but you will never be a master...
This is Rahelios, and I want to tell you a story about myself. I've always considered myself a really fast learner. I grasp things quickly and always want to rush through things. I've learned from many mentors that, “A true master is a master of the basics.” Another of my mentors always says, “You've got to master the fundamentals. The fundamentals ARE the “advanced stuff!”
People want to hurry up and rush through to get to the advanced training. So, I'm watching my daughter and my son; I have a six-year-old daughter and an 11-year-old son. They're practicing music, practicing the ukulele. They're going through their lessons, and my six-year-old, the little girl, is very meticulous. She keeps going over the same lesson over and over again because she wants to get it just right. If it's not exactly right, she goes back and does it again. My 11-year-old is watching her, and he’s getting annoyed and frustrated. He's like, "Why do you keep going over the same lesson? That's good enough, go to the next one!" He's just breezing through it because he learns fast, he’s like his dad.
As I'm watching this, I realize she's actually going to end up being a much better musician. By the time, let's say, he gets to lesson 20, he will have gone through all those lessons maybe three-quarters good, pretty good, mostly good, but not quite there, just good enough. Meanwhile, the six-year-old, let's say it takes her six months to get to lesson 20. But she's mastering every single lesson to perfection before moving on to the next. So, it's almost like she is a master the entire way through the progression. By the time she gets to lesson 20, she'll be playing at this masterful level because she's got it to perfection. Whereas he might now be on lesson 30 or 40, but still only three-quarters good. So even though he gets there faster, he never actually reaches mastery.
And I've seen this in myself, in every way, but specifically in music. This applies to martial arts and everything in life, but I'll stick with the music analogy a little longer. Oftentimes when practicing a passage, a particularly complicated passage of music, it might have a fast run of notes, and you want to blow through it. You play it with clinkers, little mistakes, over and over. Finally, one time you get through it and think, "Hey, I did it, all right, next." But you've practiced the mistake so many times that you've programmed it into your neurology. You never actually get it good. Then you want to practice faster, hitting the bad notes repeatedly.
What I've noticed is that when I slow down and practice accuracy, mastering the basics, hitting each note accurately, and paying attention to my fingers, my breath if I'm playing the saxophone, or the tension in my fingers if I'm playing the guitar, focusing on doing it perfectly, really slowly. If I practice it perfectly slowly, over and over, that programs my neurology to do it perfectly. And what I've found is that after doing that slowly and perfectly, without ever trying to go fast, suddenly fast comes easy. It's like you wake up one day, try it fast, and no problem, it just flows because you've mastered it.
It's not about speed. Moving faster is always the urge, to hurry and get to the finish line. I've made this mistake so many times in business courses and training I've taken. It's like, "Okay, I want to hurry up and become a millionaire, so I'm going to learn everything there is to learn. I'm going to listen to this guy and go through his 35 lessons in 20 days." I slam through the material and get to the end, wondering why I don't have the result. Now I realize that if I had gone back and just mastered each step one by one, making sure not to move on until I nailed it, until I got that step so well that I'm ready to move on because I've totally got it, I understand it. And here's another thing: you never totally get it; you're never perfect. You can always go back and get better, especially at the basics. But get to a point of mastery before moving on. Then, when you get to the end, you'll have the result, and you'll be a master all the way through.
That's just a dramatically better outcome. It touches on so many things. People talk about experience, for instance, "Oh, I've got 40 years of experience in whatever." And it's like, well, that could mean a lot, but it could also mean that you've been doing it wrong for 40 years. Over and over, you've been practicing doing it wrong, and if that's the case, what good is that experience? That might seem ridiculous, but I actually see that a lot. You see that a lot as you go through the world, people who've been doing something their entire lives and they still do it poorly. It's not the way to be; it's not the way that I would like to be. It's not the way that I would like to raise my children.
Certainly, if we all took a little more time to master the basics so that we could perform at a high level - whatever level we're at - you can be at a high level if you're performing “masterfully.” It's not about the end. Wherever you are, you can perform masterfully if you're always focusing on those fundamentals. Again, a true master is a master of the basics.
But then there is another side to this coin. Often when you come upon truths, you always find paradox. It's a strange thing that the universe exists in paradox, and it's almost like when I come upon the true essence of something, it always ends up in paradox. So that's where the yin-yang and the balance and the flow come in.
Okay, there's another side of this coin because if you're always wanting to get something perfect before you can move on, now we get the perfectionist hangup, right? Where, and I've had this too, a lot where it's like, "Oh, I can't move on because I don't have it yet. It's not good enough yet. It's not perfect enough yet. I don't understand it well enough yet. I can't talk about it enough yet. I don't know enough about it yet. I can't move on to the next step. I can't go on. I can't progress because it's got to be just right. It's got to be just so." And that's where now we flip-flop over to the other side where it becomes paralysis. You've maybe heard the term paralysis by analysis; you're just overanalyzing every little detail and piece of minutiae, so you can't even progress. You just stay stuck at step one for your entire life, and that's, of course, no good either because like I said before, you never actually get it perfect. You never actually get there.
The infinity of the universe goes on and on, forever outward, forever inward, forever in every direction. So no matter what you're doing, it can always be increased in perfection, increased in accuracy to some degree.
And at some point, you need to move on. You need to give yourself permission to say, "Okay, this is good enough. I can now move to the next level, to the next lesson, to the next point, to the next kick, to the next punch. I can learn a new technique. I can move on."
So where is that point? Well, that's a question you need to ask yourself: When is it good enough? When is it good enough for you? And if you tend to be a perfectionist, like I have, like I said, many times, sometimes it's never good enough. Nothing that you see yourself doing is good enough. And so this becomes a point of introspection where you have to really look at it and say… Well, maybe something that could be helpful to you… Okay, let's put it this way. It could be helpful to you to consider if you were teaching somebody else or if you were giving advice to somebody else. So look at yourself from outside of yourself and say, "If I were giving advice to somebody else, and I really care about this person, I really want them to succeed, and they're doing this thing, and they're at this level, would I tell them, 'Hey, that's totally good. Move on, man. Keep going. Get to the next step. You've got that.' Or would I be saying, 'No, that's total slop. You're slopping it up.'?" Of course, we do that to ourselves. When you look at yourself, you pull out the microscope, and you're like, "Oh, no, it's crap." No matter how good it is, it's crap. But then other people look at what you're doing, and they're like, "Hey, that's freaking fantastic." So we can be our own worst critic there. So it helps to be self-aware in that way, where you can step outside of yourself and look at it from the perspective of, "If this performance was being done by somebody else, would I be critical of them, or would I be telling them that's great, that's a good job?" And mean it, you know. We're not talking about fluffing it here.
So there has to be that balance achieved in order to flow. So keep that in mind. And as a final piece to this, things always come around in cycles. So you're focusing on mastering the basics, focusing on this thing, and you're not going to move on until you get it down. You want to master it, but then you get to a point where it's like, "Okay, that is good enough. That feels solid. I'm good." And you're going to move on because you allow yourself. You don't want to get stuck on the other side of that balance where you're paralyzed, so you move through it. But then, after a while, you find yourself reaching a new level of mastery. You get to a point—let's go back, using the music analogy once again—after 5 years of playing, or 10 years of playing, you're going to look back at what you thought was good enough 10 years ago. You thought it was good, and you moved on to the next lesson, and the next lesson, and it was good, good for where you were then. But when you listen, if you listen to it now, and by the way, recording yourself is a very good thing to do in many situations, with music, with speaking, with martial arts, video recording yourself and looking at your technique. But so later on, as you attain a higher level of mastery and you go back and you look at what you thought was good enough years ago, you're going to realize, "Oh, now I see the faults. Now I see the flaws in what I had back then." And that's where you can go back. You cycle back around, back to that fundamental, back to that basic. And that's why you're still always working on mastering the basics. So you cycle back to the beginning and you start at square one, and you fix that little—as in martial arts—that little piece of leverage. Maybe your hip just wasn't aligned right, so you don't have the right leverage in this throw, or you're not positioning yourself in the right area of your opponent's body. You're a little bit off-center, and that's why it doesn't quite work just right, and you never realized that before. But when you look back, you can fix those little chinks and focus on those basics even more. And now you start gaining a whole higher level of mastery by going back to those basics and mastering it again, mastering it better than before. And that process will also always repeat and spiral. It's a spiral because you're not just going in a circle; you're spiraling, always moving in a direction towards higher and higher mastery. But you always get back to the same place again, but kind of at a different frequency. You're at a different level, you're in a different unit of time, a different place in your personal understanding. So you spiral through this world, spiral through these different processes, always getting higher and higher and higher levels of mastery, never attaining it, never attaining perfection. The perfection is in the process, but it's a lot of fun, isn't it? So there you go.
