The most valuable experiences are those we intentionally
avoid. Mistakes, screwups. However, setting yourself up for obvious failure with
the intent to learn and grow, is not something productive to do. A flawlessly
awesome individual isn’t dangerous to their enemies, their challengers, or
their competition. They are most dangerous to themselves. By the title, I’m
saying it literally—being right in an absolute sense, not mere feeling right. Absolutely
right, as in, your life is set in perfect order and everything you set to
achieve, you do.
Let’s examine the life of the, college student who gets
straight A’s, graduates and gets a job with a decent salary, and has mediocre
views of the future, raising kids, saving up for retirements, has relatively
mediocre interests that are low risk low reward like watching tv shows, listening
to music, enjoying life in general. The type of person who has never felt any
significant adversity that provokes existential crisis, deep depression,
suicidal thoughts, questioned the existence of God, been betrayed by a loved
one, all has gone completely fine for them. Do you think they would understand
just a little bit, and be able to empathize with someone who is in a depressive
rut? Absolutely not.
Here’s the thing, such a person, does not exist. Everyone
has or will at some point experience life shattering adversities that will put
their egos to shame. However, why is it that we often see people who are
exactly like this, in the way they view and treat people who are stuck in a
rut? If everyone has felt adversity, shouldn’t everyone be empathetic of each
other? Well, there are three main things why they don’t: They haven’t lived
long enough to experience true adversity, they are actually in adversity and
they are just hiding the fact so that they save face or attain a certain image
in pursuit of social strata, or, the most interesting bunch, they forgot how it
feels to be helpless and desperate.
People’s lives are usually defined based on what they have
gone through a few months ago, at least on a subconscious level. They might
admit they have been a professional X for 7 years, but if he hasn’t done X stuff
in the last 8 months, it’s safe to say that x is probably not his major concern
right now, maybe he cares more about Y stuff now. He might as well have no
empathy in himself back when he was an active X. You kind of forget yourself as
you get old, lose touch, and feel differently about the same things. For
example, your world was shattered when your ex broke up with you, now your
ex-wife asked for divorce and you feel nothing. This might lead you to
trivializing the emotional impact a breakup has on a young teen, by laughing at
that young teen and calling him weak. When presented with the question, “but didn’t
you have the same reaction when you were a teen?” in your defense you would
say, “yes, but I was stupid back then, I am a different person.” As you
continue by detailing on how the teen should instead feel based on how you feel
about breakups now.
They say, “A smart person isn’t someone who learns from
personal mistakes, but from other people’s mistakes.” Which is to a certain
extent, true. However, to assume that this implies that you should live a
flawless life and feed on other people’s experience to guide you through life
is an obvious mind-trap. There is a fundamental flaw in language that makes it
impossible for experiences to be fully understood unless experienced
first-hand.
The dangers of winning is that it gives a false sense of
leverage over the next task by form of inertia. Of course, in a lot of things
in life, there is a certain pareto
distribution to success, which means, as you succeed more and get more
famous, more people offer you more opportunity. The graph doesn’t climb
linearly (1,2,3,4,5…) the pareto distribution of success means that it will go
(1,2,6,16,44,120). However, in life, just like in combat, there are many
unconsidered factors that make it seem random. You know, maybe this isn’t the jump from 2 to 6, maybe you
actually need to slow down and take 3 very seriously with the expectation to do
4 even better, and if life pushes you up to 44 eventually. But don’t expect it,
just enjoy living from one step to another. Because at the very worst, which is
the most likely, that’s all you’ll ever do.
This attitude is evident in the victory Japan had over
Russia in 1904, which lead to somewhat of a confidence in Japan to attack the
US, way before completing its formation of a solid army in Asia. I always
thought, and asked this question to my history teacher back in high school
(2014), I always thought it was a foolish idea to invade the U.S. way before
their forces in Asia were fully established. I asked this to my teacher, her
hypothesis was that the Japanese were overconfident due to their previous
success in recent battles. This is what Sun Tzu meant by, “don’t make your
enemies fight to the death.” I figure that he is implying that the enemy’s
notion that you are a notorious victor might act as a disadvantage on your
part. The enemy knows all about you and you know nothing about them (because thus
far they have never won anything).
The person who is the most dangerous is the person who has
nothing to lose, someone who has never won anything and has never been right
about anything has no reputation to protect or any ego to satisfy. For them,
failure is the norm, success is the exception. Whereas for the notoriously
victorious, success in the expectation, and failure is a shame. The hustle
experience for both sides are vastly different in terms of enjoyableness.
Back in high school, despite knowing why Japan lost; I
became pathologically cocky due to my unchallenged skill in martial arts, I always
credited myself as a competent fighter ever since I won a gold medal in my
first fight in a taekwondo match. I was that kid, who would do backflips in the
yard after school, and was somewhat respected by those who were the “bad kids”,
some even jokingly/ironically challenged about fighting me, to which everyone
laughed. It was good a joke, nobody could fight the gold medalist. However
having internalized a few months of compliments and support, and confidence in
my competence, I headed to my second fight in November of 2014, and ended up
messing up my ankle, and I got bashed by my trainers and seniors so bad I
dropped out of Taekwondo out of shame and regret. The reason I fucked up my
second fight was that I used exactly the same technique I used to win the first
fight, I didn’t train with a sparring partner, so I was not good at reacting, I
was only practicing hard on endurance and power, not situational awareness. I
would train every day for 4 months, very hard and intense, imagining me being
in some sort of “Rocky movie training montage.” I had the mindset that if I
just go harder than the opponent, and beat myself up more than he does, I will
win because “God is fair”, or something like that. My opponent was not
particularly good at his kicks though, he was sloppy and weak, however, due to
my insistence on using the narrae, which
I had been practicing on for 4 months, which did not suit the situation
whatsoever, I got carried away by my adrenaline because I had never used it in
a fight, only kicked a passive target with it—and ended up landing wrongly on
the outer side of my foot, folding my foot inward, completely dislocating the
ankle. If I were to go back and tell myself what to train, I’d tell myself to
just spar gently with a sparring partner and learn to react to incoming kicks
properly, instead of outkicking the opponent.
Trying to outkick the opponent will only lead to exhaustion, and the opponent
would just step back and back and all your kicks would have missed and he wouldn’t
have broken a sweat. Which was exactly what happened to me.
It was too costly of a mistake on my body and mental that I
decided to give up. I can’t take more of this.
Failure in small portions
When you take failure in small portions, they become easier
to digest, whereas if your failure was as huge and disabling as mine, it would
have been way too traumatic and overwhelming to even focus on anything
technical. What I have learned is that, training should involve familiarizing
the brain to failure. If you only shoot where you will hit, you start to lose
focus because focus doesn’t matter anyways, you’ll always hit. A good
indication that you are practicing correctly is that you continue to figure out
new ways to fail. As put in the narrator of the Magpul Dynamic Pistol course
commercial video, “Amateurs train until they get it right, professionals train
until they get it wrong.”
If you are on a win streak, you better watch yourself. Being
right is more of a danger than it is a reward. Don’t stay in the game because
you love to win, stay in the game because you love to fight, and failing is
just part of it, winning, is a bonus.
