The next time you have a few spare seconds before a meeting, stop, take a deep breath, and think about what you need to do to perform at your best.
The idea of “going for that” is a great one and we’re all on board with that. The problem is that once we have gone for that, there’s no easy way to return to the original goal. And the best way to get back to that goal is to not go for that. In a word, we’re afraid of failure.
Its not just the idea of going for that that scares us. We also believe in the idea that if you want to be at your best, you have to go for that, and if you don’t, its because you’re not. It’s that simple. And that scares us.
The thing is, we have to go for that, and if we do, we have to learn to live with the idea that we might fail, and that scares us too. The thing is, we don’t really care, but we fear it. We fear the possibility that we might be too afraid to fail, and if we become too afraid to fail, we might learn to fear failure. We fear failure if we have to fail.
We are all afraid of failure, and we know it. Its the fear that stops us from doing what we know is the right thing to do. We can never go back and regret that. The thing is, we are a society, and we learn from failure. We learn from our failures. We learn from our mistakes. We learn from our successes. But when we learn from our mistakes, its because we learned from ourselves.
We learn the hard way. If we learn from our mistakes, we can’t just do it again. It’s either the same thing again, or something else. If we learn from our mistakes, we learn from something new, and that’s what makes us learn from ourselves.
In the same way that an organization learns from their failures, a martial arts school learns from their successes. Success is what allows you to move on to the next class. Failure is what prevents you from continuing. The more we know, and accept, the less we need to keep failing.
In martial arts, a black belt is a black belt, a brown belt, a brown belt, a brown belt, a brown belt, a brown belt, a brown belt, a brown belt, a brown belt. That’s it. Its essentially just the way the karate arts work. So if you get thrown out of karate class for drinking too much, well, you should probably be wearing a belt. Likewise for a martial arts school.
The problem with martial arts is that it is a highly structured discipline. It is a very mechanical method of training, one that requires very little room to learn from mistakes or to practice from the experience that comes from the learning that you do. In a way, this is similar to the way the martial arts are structured in other sports. Take football. There are no rules, no set form, no set rules. Instead, the players have to put in the work.
It’s the same with martial arts in our case. You put in the practice and the training is an experience you’ll never forget.
