6 Lessons from the Mat
Special Thanks to Al, my ChatGPT AI assistant, for helping me make this post clearer and more engaging.
Every time I post, I ask myself “How can I make this post valuable for you?” Here’s a glimpse into the process:
In the spirit of transparency and showing my work, I’m including a segment in this post you normally never see. I use a mental model to construct my posts called: “Think Before You Ink”.
Main Point: What is your main objective for this post? To show useful lessons I’ve taken from my Aikido practice that I can share with people who don’t go in for martial arts.
Importance: Why should it matter to them? A genius learns from other people’s efforts. (Bonus: It saves you a few bruises.)
Action: What action should this post inspire? I hope you’ll give these concepts serious thought and make them part of your daily life.
Applying Aikido Principles to Daily Life
1. Awareness - If you can’t get out of the way, the rest doesn’t matter.
Situational Awareness: It floors me when people wander through busy parking lots (often pushing a stroller with kids inside) with their attention firmly on their cellphones. Paying attention to what goes on around you is essential. You can’t afford to be oblivious to the car coming your way, the bar you’ve wandered into, the next big layoff where you work, or the threats extremism of all stripes can cause. Evolution is still in effect. Even though we live in the safest and most prosperous times in history, your results will vary.
2. Harmony - Don’t collide with your opponent, guide your opponent.
Someone is coming at you with a baseball bat. Block, or step to where your opponent can’t hit you? In Aikido, as the bat swings, you step far inside the range where it can hurt you and get immediately next to your opponent. You then guide them to lose balance while protecting yourself from harm. You usually “assist” them to move much farther in the direction they were already going than they intended. Aikido is sometimes known as the gentle art of hitting people with the planet.
Let’s try it THIS way…
Understand others’ perspectives so you can see things they might have missed and find ways to guide them where you want them to go. Use their goals to guide them toward mutually beneficial outcomes. Start from a position where you can be in harmony with your opponent’s movements.
"I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don’t know the other side’s argument better than they do." - Charlie Munger
3. Quick (And Effective) Decision-Making
Adaptability: Aikido teaches you to make decisions on the fly. This skill is crucial in fast-paced environments where quick thinking is essential. If you’re like me, you usually make urgent decisions by imagining a way forward and then giving it a quick check to see if there are obvious showstoppers. Not a great approach.
When speed is essential, you don’t have the luxury of time to brainstorm several solutions and then weigh the pros and cons of each approach, but you can get much better-quality decisions by adding two things (which take almost no extra time):
Consider at least 3 possibilities. For example, “Should I fire this guy or not?” Becomes “Should I fire him, keep him, or transfer him to a job he’s better suited for?” Almost any decision can be improved by considering another option
Ask yourself “…and then what?” By doing this you force yourself to look at the consequences of the possible choices and how to deal with them.
4. Balance in Chaos
Staying Grounded: Maintaining balance, both physically and mentally, even when everything around you is chaotic, helps in staying calm and focused under pressure.
Be mentally prepared that things will go wrong. No one knows what will happen next but keeping a mindset that allows you to roll with the punches and be alert for opportunities will help keep you calm and effective. For example, when too many things are coming at you at work:
Identify the most important action you can take (prioritize the incoming tasks).
Do that.
Repeat.
This approach helps me to stay calm whether I’m taking on multiple opponents or dealing with a lot of issues at work.
5. Patience and Trust in the Process: To get better at anything you need to realize it takes time and a good process to learn complex new skills. From your day-to-day perspective, you might think your progress has stalled. Try looking back six months and compare it with what you knew back then.
The process you build should:
Give you a basic understanding of the skill.
Practice the skill in various ways.
Give you immediate feedback.
Loop until you master the skill.
Integrate the skill with the other skills you have.
When I started learning to roll in Aikido, I could roll without hurting myself, but I thumped several times as I went over. A few months later, my rolls were silent, but I couldn't fall in a hard throw without pain. About a year later, I accidentally slipped on the icy stairwell at our community center and naturally went into a roll down 26 steps with no injury. My wife had seen me slip at the top of the stairs and thought I'd be dead, but when she ran up to see what had happened, I was standing at the bottom of the stairwell with a slow grin spreading on my face. Patience and trust in the process lead to mastering a skill over time.
6. Knowing the Difference Between Pain and Harm: In Aikido, you learn to differentiate between pain, which can be a part of growth and learning, and harm, which causes lasting damage. Aikido techniques such as joint locks can be excruciating without causing lasting harm.
Learning to deal with the immediate pain to reach a goal makes it possible to take calculated risks and push boundaries without causing long-term negative effects.
During training, applying a wrist lock can cause significant discomfort. This immediate pain does not result in harm. In contrast, ignoring your body's signals and pushing through harmful pain can lead to lasting injuries. Understanding the difference helps you take calculated risks and push your limits safely.
Unsolicited Endorsement of Readwise: If you’re looking for a way to make the most out of your reading, I highly recommend giving Readwise a try. I’ve been using Readwise to help me retain and revisit important lessons from the books and articles I read for years. I can be confident that I won’t forget that wonderful idea that I just found. I have all of my notes and highlights saved and I get a daily review to keep them fresh.
I don’t have any affiliation with Readwise or get anything from promoting them. It’s just the best tool I’ve found to help make the lessons I work hard to find, stick in my mind.
That’s My Perspective.