Life Lesson

Earlier today I had my match and we ended in a draw. It was three rounds of the most brutal fighting ever seen on Earth. Ok, maybe not, but it was good fun. I would say we were even in the first round, he won the second, and I won the third. He came out aggressive in the second and tried to stay close to me and even though I landed a few punches, he scored a few more good points in the second with his punches. His punches felt like bricks when they landed. Not sure what he thought about my punches. In the third I used my strength, which is my legs. When he tried to come in close again I caught him off guard with a well-timed kick, which kept him at a distance the rest of the round. That allowed me to score some well-placed kicks and gave me the advantage in the round.


Throughout the day, every match was declared a draw. Some of us started looking at each other and wondering how that could be when one was clearly better than the other? I quickly realized that as long as you met your competition, it didn't matter how good or bad you did, you would be rated a draw for your efforts. But I didn't realize the deeper meaning until the teachers began to speak after all the matches ended. As we found out today, from those wiser than us, today was not about determining winners or losers.

How many of us have watched others practice their techniques and thought "I can do that form better than he can" or "my running front kick is better than hers"? The problem is that this thinking is based on the idea that training is a competition between students to be the "best". It is not surprising that many people feel this way, because society places so much emphasis on "winning", as opposed to the personal self-enrichment of the activity. This idea that winning is the most important thing and that the winner takes all may have a place in professional sports, because a professional sport is not a game; it is a business.

The attitude of being the "best" or even "better" than others has no place. Other schools foster this attitude because they teach martial arts as a sport with competitions and tournaments. There is no philosophy behind this manner of teaching except "winning". In these schools, the ego of the "winner" grows and he or she becomes more aggressive with each win, while the "loser" becomes more discouraged and looses self-esteem. When a martial art is properly taught, the goal is to increase the skills and self-esteem of each student and to teach the student to be humble and calm. This can only happen in a school where a student is not ridiculed for his mistakes, but accepts them and learns from them, and ego is balanced by a humble attitude that comes from understanding that there is always infinite room for improvement in your skills.

It doesn't really matter whether one person is "better" than another. For one thing, that would imply that there is a definition we can all agree on for the term "better". For another, no matter how "good" a person is, sooner or later someone "better" will come along.

So, if we shouldn't strive to be the "best", what are we training for? What they are trying to teach us is that each of us should strive to be as good as he or she can be and that the more we train sincerely, the better we can be. We are not competing with anyone else; what others do is irrelevant. What really matters is that we train sincerely and never become completely satisfied with our level of achievement. Once that happens, sincere training will cease.

There is another aspect of this idea that they explored. People who feel good about themselves when they think they are "better" than someone else have a serious problem with their self-esteem. If a person must feel "better" than someone else in order to feel good about himself, that person is going to be unhappy most of his life; in other words, if you allow your self-esteem to depend on what others think of you, you will never be truly happy.

Only when your self-esteem comes from a strong inner belief that you are a valuable person can you have a chance to be truly happy. This type of self-esteem can't come from compliments from others; it can't come from anything you don't have to earn with your own hard effort. The only way you can get it is by doing something that is difficult for you to do and doing it until you do it well in your own mind. You may receive compliments from others for this achievement, but those compliments won't sustain you. What will sustain you is your own effort and achievement. There is no better place to invest your effort than in improving yourself.