Beyond Bricks and Bars by Reginald Nesmith & VINCENT MORRISON

Author:Reginald Nesmith & VINCENT MORRISON [NESMITH, REGINALD & MORRISON, VINCENT]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781984520586
Publisher: Xlibris US
Published: 2018-04-30T04:00:00+00:00

NOTES:

LEARN FROM YOUR MISTAKES

As long as you live, there is one thing you will never be able to avoid. In spite of your best efforts and well-laid plans, it is inevitable that you will make a mistake of some kind. It’s simply a fact of life. No one is immune from it or, as the saying goes, nobody is perfect. As long as you live you cannot escape this fact. This is not to say there is something wrong with you. On the contrary, you are supposed to make mistakes. For in those mistakes you will find an opportunity to learn something and grow from it.

This is something I first learned back when I was practicing martial arts. I will admit that I used to hate it when the instructor would point out some flaw in my technique or correct me whenever I messed up a form. In fact, I still don’t like it when someone has to correct me. It feels sometimes as if I’ve failed completely. But like my Sabo-Nim was fond of saying: If you don’t make a mistake, you’re not trying. If you don’t learn from it, you’re not improving. And indeed I did improve, a lot actually. Even in tournament competition. My first real tournament, I lost a sparring match to someone I was supposed to beat. I don’t have the words to describe how depressed I was about it afterwards. But once I got over it, I was able to analyze what underlying issues I had and improved upon them. The next competition, I could not be stopped.

I used that example to highlight a principle that I want each and every one of us to understand. Yes, failure is bad. Especially after you put so much effort into what you may try to accomplish. However, once we get past our own hubris, we find that we learn more from defeat than we do from victory. The ones who ultimately are truly triumphant are the ones who take those lessons and apply them, then bounce back stronger than ever. Take my earlier example, for instance. After my defeat, I realized that the problem wasn’t my skill. I was ranked much higher than my opponent and had more experience in fighting. However, that was the key to my own downfall. My mistake in that instance was to underestimate my opponent and overestimate my own ability. I became arrogant, I fought lazily, gave too many openings, and of course, my opponent took advantage of this. By the time I realized what was happening, it was too late. At that point, I let my anger get the best of me, which caused me to lose what little focus I had in the match and long story short I ended up disqualified for using a strike with the intent to cause serious injury. In other words, I beat myself.

It was thanks to that incident that I was able to understand where I had gone wrong. If it hadn’t been for that loss, I never would have been able to advance myself as a martial artist.

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