I was reading Mastery by Robert Green and one of the things that stuck out for me was how Robert stressed the importance of the ‘apprenticeship phase’ before creativity and mastery can be reached. It reminded me of key lessons I learned early (and unconsciously) through martial arts practice.

However reflecting a little more I would suggest the learning mindset should never change and what one should truly develop is a ‘lifelong apprentice mindset’.

Never stop learning new areas

Everyone talks about lifelong learning today. Most people think about deepening their subject area expertise when they do. I think there is a bigger opportunity hidden in expanding into completely new areas.

Robert Greene has some such examples in his book as well, as he discusses people who went through multiple different apprenticeships over the time of their life, finally merging those skills together to understand underlying principles better or to develop completely new areas.

The most compelling opportunity that learning new areas opens up is the fact that the spectrum of things you can do widens instead of shrinking. If your focus is on getting better and better at one single thing, you face a good chance of either that thing becoming obsolete in the future or someone else outcompeting you in that narrowly scoped area. If you learn to do many things well, then your horizon of opportunities keeps expanding through your life as you mix those abilities into new compelling portfolios.

I learned this in martial arts, studying diverse disciplines and with that enhancing my core style. Looking back it rubbed off on my approach to professional life as well, where over the years I pursued experiences in coding, marketing, business development, PR, product management and teaching.

Learn to love pain and frustration

Robert Greene mentions this as well: you must learn to embrace and seek learning experiences that are painful and frustrating. If you don’t focus on the things that are hardest for you (and thus most painful and frustrating), then you won’t learn the traits of your trade that you are deficient in and will never truly master the area.

It’s way too easy to focus on the easy wins and the things that you’re good at. I am guilty of that too. However only playing to your strengths will prevent you from expanding the scope of your abilities. While leading to quicker wins in the short time, it will limit your ability to master an area long term since you will never close those capability gaps.

Martial arts teaches through pain, sweat and tears. For good schools that’s figuratively rather than literally (maybe with the exception of the sweat part). However they make you constantly face your biggest challenges and learn to overcome them. I think the same is true for our professional development, only with the big difference that it’s usually up to you to push yourself beyond your limits. Business often offers you an easy way out until the day when it’s too late to change. You need to be pushing yourself.

The three takeaways

• Never stop learning. Never think you ‘know it’.
• When you feel like you’ve reached a comfortable level in mastering an area, then it’s time to disrupt yourself and move on to something entirely different.
• Focus on learning the skills that are hard for you. You will learn the things that align with your strengths anyway. As to learning time, your knowledge gaps are what needs the most attention.

Over the years I learned to separate good martial arts practitioners into two categories: Preservers and Creators. Of course there are many more categories you could use to slice the population, but let’s stick with those two for now.

Hilmar Fuchs, the best example of a life-long creator that we were fortunate enough to train with.

Preservers

The majority of practitioners – students and teacher alike – are what I call preservers. They study the arts with great passion and try to learn as many techniques and forms as possible. They strive to learn and copy those techniques (and often also their teacher’s quotes) as precisely and verbatim as humanly possible.

Most are really good with that and I kind of envy them, because my memory usually fails me when I try to learn things by heart.

Preservers are important to keep a style alive the way it was envisioned and practiced by his creator. They are the historians and librarians of martial arts and the styles. However they often run the risk of thinking that they practice the only correct and legitimate way.

Creators

Only a few martial arts practitioners go beyond the limits of what they were shown. They focus on the principles rather than the exact preservation of the movements. They eventually will push beyond what they learned from their teacher and style.

Very often creators will get inspirations from different arts and bring them back into their own art and style, making it richer and more diverse along the way. They will also go down a wrong path much more often than preservers, who stick to the known and tested. Rather than keeping the art precisely as it is, they will help develop it further with time.

Amongst their martial arts peers, creators are not always looked upon too nicely as they don’t stick to the official teachings. However, in the end only creators move the art ahead and keep it alive. If you look back, you will realize that every style and art started with a creator.

One of the trickiest parts about being a creator however is to keep the creator mindset alive. All too often creators become preservers once they found their style and from there on insist that everyone follows their rules to the detail.

Uli and I were fortunate to learn from two great creators and martial art pioneers, Hilmar Fuchs and Roland Habersetzer, right from the beginning. They did spoil us for other teachers though and set a pretty high bar for teachers that we would follow.

While both preservers and creators have their important role in keeping the arts alive, there are two more types that need to be called out. Please try to not be one of them.

Collectors

I met a few over the years. Collectors have a goal to ‘master’ an art in a certain time. They collect forms, teachings and teachers with great passion and effort very quickly. They usually make progress very quickly but then drop off completely after a relatively short time.

While there is no harm in doing that, I feel sorry for the time they invest without following through and therefore missing the insights and benefits that can only come over time. They burn fast and hot, but not for a long time.

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)

Randomizers

Randomizers do not spend enough effort and time to learn an art. They practice but their knowledge remains shallow because their heart and mind are not really at it. Usually they like to practice, like to sweat or just like the company, but they don’t care deeply enough about learning and thus don’t invest the time and effort to overcome the pain and frustration that true learning always entails.

Most of them do little harm but some become teachers due to tenure in a style rather than qualification. Learn to spot randomizers quickly and try to stay away from them, especially when they pretend to be teachers (you can often identify them by their dogmatic approach).

Our knees are a critical link to make our movements connected and grounded. In martial arts we start movements from the hip, but actually if you think about it, the leg muscles are the ones that initiate that movement. And the leg muscles need the knees to transform power into kinetic energy. There is no proper martial arts movement that doesn’t start from the knees.

The knees are perfectly designed to flex and support your body weight dynamically for that motion. They are not designed for torque or tilt with only limited range for rotation.

And that’s where the problem begins for many martial arts practitioners and sports enthusiasts. I was one of them. I was doing a lot of athletics and running when I was 16. And my knees hurt almost every day. I was lucky that I met my Karate and Tai Chi teacher Hilmar Fuchs at the age of 20. He taught me how to use my knees properly and equally important, what movements to avoid. Today I’m way older (let’s not talk about that right now), I’m still practicing martial arts and running and I have no knees problems at all. I’m pretty sure without Hilmar’s intervention I would have had a knee surgery already.

That is precisely why Uli and I put so much emphasis on proper walking and knee utilization in our Tai Chi classes. The classical Tai Chi bow step teaches us many principles about how to use the knee and what to avoid. ‘Normal’ walking looks different, but the key principles still translate.

Here is my list of key principles for the bow step that we focus on in our classes:

1. Knees point in the same direction as toes
2. Push the knee no further than over your big toe
3. Keep some flexibility, don’t lock your knees
4. Feet are shoulder wide apart
5. Pull weight off a foot before you turn it
6. Hip initiates moves and turns, not the legs, feet or arms
7. Keep your hip on the same level, don’t go up and down

The key goal of most of those is to avoid tilt or torque forces on the knee by avoiding to turn against resistance, over-extending or having unnatural angles between the toes and the knee direction. Some of the principles are also meant to most efficiently translate power into kinetic energy, starting a motion with strong but slow muscles and then engaging weaker but faster muscles. But that’s a topic for another blog post.

Pay attention to what you’re doing, you want to be able to practice for a lifetime without regular visits to your favorite surgeon.