A THOUSAND TIMES
“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”
Bruce Lee.
The name Bruce Lee will forever be remembered not just in Martial Arts, but in Philosophy. In his short life, he burned bright and hard like the sun, and the warmth is still being felt to this day. I know he inspired a lot of people to study martial arts too, but I’m actually not one of them. I’d heard about him from larger-than-life stories passed around in the playground at school or at home, but I didn’t have the opportunity to watch his movies until way, way later, for a number of reasons, one of which was ,well, no VHS; if it wasn’t being shown on regular TV at night or the weekends on the black-and-white, and later coloured TV, we didn’t watch it. The VHS came later though, so there’s that. I probably was influenced to take up martial arts by watching guys like Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, Yuen Biao, Van Damme, Bolo Yeung, Gordon Liu, Alexander Lo, Hwang Jang Lee, Lau Kar-Leung, among others. Bruce came way, way later; my first real interaction with him was reading an article on him in an old magazine in the house, and then drawing his picture (visual art was my escape growing up; I could draw really well actually). After that, it wasn’t until I was a young adult that I watched his movies.
I took up martial arts in my first year in the university (class of 2003), after years of learning from what I had been watching on-screen (all the kung-fu movies my uncle bought for his Video rental business really helped). I started with Karate, before transitioning to Taekwondo after about a year after my Sensei changed schools. I practiced TKD and the little Karate I had learned till I graduated, but something happened by around my 3rd year.
Well, someone happened actually.
I had a coursemate, Cajetan, who decided he wanted to learn martial arts. After 1 lesson with him though, he decided he was gonna train himself. I shrugged and said ‘yeah, cool, okay, good luck’, and thought nothing of it. So every morning, while me and my friends would train on one side of the Badminton court, he would be on the other side. Sometimes I would stop to look at what he was doing, shake my head, and focus on what I was doing. However, I noticed something; none of us, not even my TKD coaches which included a State Champion, tried to spar with him.
Why?
I mean, he was so slow, I used to joke that if he threw a punch, you could go down, do 4 push-ups, get back up and STILL block his punch, so why did none of us want to ever stand in front of him to actually block his punch?
Well, I can’t speak for others, but this is what I saw; Cajetan would come to training, do his pushups and whatever cardio he could think of in his trademark awkward manner, then proceed to throw his funny punches and kicks with ZERO TECHNIQUE, and then proceed to slam his fists and arms on the metal posts holding the Badminton net.
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Like BONGGGG! BONGGG! BONGGGG!
Why would I want to stand in front of THAT? I was fragile! And when I heard a story of how he sent a conductor at the park to sleep with his fist (or fists; I forget which) over change (always the conductors), I began to look at him with some form of respect. But then again, it was par for the course; after all, he must have struck that metal post with his fists over a thousand times at the very least. While I was learning different techniques and not being grounded in any, he had mastered one crucial one; the art of dealing with pain and plowing through, and no one wanted to deal with that.
Now I’m older and a better, wiser martial artist, and thankfully, I have a Sifu who understands first principles, making sure I am grounded in the basics. In training, I could spend as much as 2 hours training one single short sequence, understanding its usage in combat, my biomechanics pre, in and post-move, as well as any variations to it, building not just resilience, but muscle memory. By the time I get to use it sparring with fighters from different disciplines, I see its effectiveness and fine-tune where necessary. I may not train the move 10,000 times, but at least it’s made me better than I used to be.
Finishing the 2nd course in the Google Data Analytics Professional certification reminds me of the above quote and story. A lot of what is being taught at this level has already been introduced, and by the time the course is over, I find myself looking at data and data projects a certain way. Now, I realize I must ask SMART questions, and I now understand why I couldn’t build dashboards before, apart from the lack of skill of course; I didn’t have a fundamental understanding of what it was for. While not being a stranger to spreadsheets, the course taught me more about some things I usually overlooked; the meaning of common error messages.
One other thing I’ve learned so far is to translate from Structured Thinking to Structured Plotting. The same way a builder will follow the architect’s plan to work, the Scope of Work will keep me ‘honest’ while working, helping me avoid scope creep, among other things. It’ll help me keep track of my Deliverables, Timelines, Milestones and reports throughout the project.
And let’s not forget about contextualization of data as well.
So, on to the next one.
Thanks Cajetan.
I understand.
