The Path to Mastering a Technical Skill
There I was surrounded by five racist thugs, by their body language it was obvious that I was about to get damaged..damaged properly. The first one moved in with a punch. I deftly deflected it and hurt him in a way that surprised him as could be clearly seen by the look on his face.
I could feel disappointment and dejection in the pack as the Alpha dog fell to the floor, the job was done. It was over. There was only one problem.
None of this happened, as a matter of fact this was the result of my very fertile imagination. In that wonderful world I was adept in Brazilian jujitsu, Escrima and Jeet Kune Do. the reality of course couldn’t be further from the truth.
I’ve been wanting to master these particular martial arts for many years. Since a young age I’ve grown up on Bruce Lee as well as many other variations of that genre.
It’s a wonderful world to be in. A world of perfect punches and kicks and awe-inspiring somersaults. But the reality is very different. The reality consists of not being a good fighter, getting hit a lot and maybe laughed at a bit. Coming back from a training session tired with not much progress.
And on a more fundamental level there is this real disconnect between what you want to become and who you really are. And who you really are may not be somebody who you want to be.
So there I was hoping for so much and not really getting anywhere. What was even more troubling was that this was not the only area of my life where I felt no real progress was being made. It was a while after that I came across the concept of habits and micro habits.
When studying the concepts of habits, what I came to realise is the issue to learning these kinds of complex skills as well as many others is fundamentally context. The context isn’t about you or who you are it’s about your approach to training or learning and what you see as the roadmap ahead.
The roadmap to learning a technical skill isn’t trying to do a somersault on the first day as a matter of fact it’s almost the opposite. It would be to break down everything that makes someone able to do a somersault. Down to every single detail and foundational practice, even when those foundational practices may seem completely disconnected. Then comes the process of starting at the beginning with the first foundational practice and by regular execution making it a habit and mastering it and making it automatic. Something that can be executed without thinking about it. And then onwards and upwards onto the next foundational practice and so on until on these bricks you achieve the somersault. It really is a classical karate kid scenario where you may be painting fences but in reality you’re learning how to fight.
But in this journey what can be frustrating is the inability to maintain a constant habit. Painting a fence karate kid style to learn a technical skill is the right path but if you don’t paint the fence every day and you are sporadic then you will not learn the skill and even more frustratingly you will not be able to build the next foundational skill on top of this one and so what ever craft you are trying to learn will rapidly become a pipe dream.
So how do you get around this? The way to get around it is to make the habit you’re trying to achieve so ridiculously small and easy to do that when you think about it, it is a complete no brainer to go and do it. If you can structure the habits that you have to do to build these foundational skills upon which incrementally technical and complex skills will be built then you’re onto something.
With this roadmap in mind I now know what lies ahead of me and that in the future when my instructor says to do something that may seem disconnected or excessively simple I can contextualise it and appreciate its importance and more fundamentally start the karate kid process of painting the fence..