The dangers of being right.

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.