Category: Kendo

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Making something that lasts

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Back in high school, when I started going to the gym to lift weights regularly, a read a cautionary bit of advise in a magazine: motivation [for training] is easy to get, but difficult to maintain. This is true for practically everything, not just sports. But simply knowing this helps to prepare and compensate for flagging motivation.

One motivation-inducing concept that resonates for me personally is working on something that I think would last a long time. Actually, most things I do fall into this category: doing research and writing papers about it, teaching, drawing, photography. Playing with my daughter is there too.

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Tim Urban nicely described the concept of transcending time by raising children in his blog post about Elon Musk. Elon reportedly views people as computers, hardware being the physical body and brain and software being the things people learn throughout their lives. In this framework, our children are one-half of ourselves in terms of their hardware, and we have a unique opportunity to contribute to development of their software by spending time with them.

Interestingly, this mind trick of convincing myself that I am working on something potentially long-lasting doesn’t work for personal development things, sports included. Old Japanese kendo sensei like asking novices, especially foreigners, “Why did you begin practicing kendo?” I think a more difficult question would be: “Why do you continuing practicing?” For me, habits really help here. Often, I go to practice simply because I’ve been doing for a long time. And then, another truism kicks in: motivation follows action.

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Habits are also dangerous, of course. if you do something mindlessly long enough, you lose the sight of what made you start in the first place. With lifting weights, I had exactly that experience a few years ago. What helped me shake this off was the fact that I injured my back and could not do my regular exercises. At that time, we were on vacation in Venice Beach, staying at an Airbnb for the first time. The place was owned by a young lady, who had lots of books on healthy lifestyle, fitness, etc. I must be in California after all, I thought. Also, the nearby Muscle Beach was bit of a holy land for me, because of it’s association with Arnold Schwarzenegger, my childhood hero. So I saw all the people, from muscleheads hanging out in the gym to wannabe Hollywood starlets shopping for healthy foods at the local supermarket, who were so different, but for whom dedication to physical training was obviously a core trait. I didn’t find any role models there per se, but I my motivation to thoughtfully train and a sense of fun of daily exercise was definitely renewed.

Perhaps, I need watch more kendo videos on YouTube or go through my favourite samurai movies?

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Habits are synthetic

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I have started reading “Better Than Before” by Gretchen Rubin, and in the introduction, she writes that habits are powerful because they eliminate the necessity of decision-making, which, she also argues, is a finite resource. Basically, you make decision once and then follow a habitual sequence of steps to the desired result without thinking about the individual steps.

This reminded me of the “Creation and Destruction” essay by John Boyd, which I came across a month ago. Boyd was a military strategist and an instructor of fighter pilots. His theory of making creative decisions is based on a continuous loop of analysis (destruction) of the current reality (and one’s mental model of it) and synthesis (creation) of a new and improved mental model. In this context, a habit, as Rubin describes it, is a synthetic process – you don’t analyze the components of a habit, but instead string them together into one complex action.

Acting without thinking, but in a way appropriate to the situation is, of course, a central concept in martial arts. In kendo, it is called mushin. And just as an everyday habit, the instinctive reaction in a fight is developed through repeated practice.

Being a fairly universal principle, habit-forming can be applied practically to everything. For example, in photography, say, I decide that I want to freeze action of dancers during a performance. I select a ‘fast’ lens, open the aperture wide, set the shutter speed high, autofocus – to continuous tracking mode, framing rate – to ‘high’ and from that point on worry only about composition and catching the dynamic moments. Actually, even this preliminary setup becomes habitual with practice. I only need to think ‘freeze action’, and the rest happens more or less on autopilot.

Of course, as Gretchen Rubin also mentions, habits are great servants, but terrible masters. They makes us more efficient, but in doing so rob us of the actual experience of the action. When you hit a pause on Boyds Observation-Orientation-Decision-Action (OODA) loop and delegate part of the sequence to a habit, you sacrifice present-moment awareness. Autopilots, after all, are not famous for their creativity.

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Patience

Violin-maker in Sforza Castle. Milan. Italy.
Violin-maker in Sforza Castle. Milan. Italy.

Last week, I was given similar advice by teachers in two seemingly unrelated disciplines: kendo and music.

In kendo, during keiko (free practice) with a fifth-dan sensei, I tried hard to take initiative and ended up attacking non-stop, without really controlling the pace of the match. Rather, the match went on neither my nor on my opponent’s terms – kind of like the match in my recent grading examination. It felt rushed and hectic, certainly not projecting the yondan-level of pace and control that I was aiming at. The advice I was given after the practice was that I should have slowed down and observed the opponent: this is practice; you should make an opening and let the opponent hit you. Even if you receive a strike, you should learn from it: “Oh, this is his speed. This is his distance.” Then, you can use this knowledge in your own oji-waza (counter-attacks).

During a violin lesson on the same day, I was learning to play with an accompaniment. My problem was that I was not holding the long notes sufficiently long and as was “running away” from the accompanist.

Basically, both in music and in kendo, I lacked patience. I anticipated what was coming up next and didn’t let the current event unfold to completion. I think this is a general problem, and I am not unique in making this mistake. My daily life is over-scheduled with activities, both work- and family-related, especially during the pre-holiday season, which for me also coincides with the end-of-the-academic-term rush to complete various teaching obligations. As I go through the day, my focus shifts from the task at hand to the next item on my calendar, and as a result, I shortchange the present moment awareness. I cut short the long note I am supposed to hold.

As usual, there are positive lessons to learn from any consistent mistake, including this one. First, the very fact that I can identify and analyze the issue means that I am already on the way to correcting it. The real problem is when I am not even aware of something being out of place. As Morpheus said to Neo in “The Matrix”, which is my all-time favourite movie:
— …It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.
–What truth?
–That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your mind.

Second, the good news is that even in the midst of a hectic, over-scheduled life there are moments when I not only can, but indeed, am expected to, to pause and enjoy the long notes.

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Being non-reactive

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The keiko portion of my yondan (4th dan) kendo exam didn’t feel right as soon I finished it. This is the “match” portion of the test, were the judges observe your sparring with an opponent, who is attempting the same-level grading. No score is kept, and you have 1 minute and 20 seconds to demonstrate your “best kendo”. Because of being nervous, I went into a shiai (competition) mode too much, and exchanged way too many strikes with my opponent, mostly rather sloppily executed. I ended up failing the exam, so my intuition was correct.

While the exam is still fresh in my memory, I thought I would try to analyze the possible ways of dealing with the urge to attack. I do realize, that thinking about kendo is not a substitute for practice, but some analysis in addition to keiko must be better than mindlessly going through the motions.

Here is a piece of advice I received from a 5th dan sensei. At the yondan level, it is important to show the judges that you are in control of the match. On one hand, this means demonstrating ‘sen’ attitude – being in the attacking mode, exerting pressure on the opponent. On the other hand, your attacks should not be forced, to borrow the term from chess. For example, if your opponent faints an attack and moves the tip of his/her (I actually had a female opponent during my previous grading, so it definitely can be ‘her’) shinai upward, and you react by flinching and immediately jerking your shinai in the same direction, the judges will mark their report cards with an “X” against your name, and you will fail the exam. Your purely instinctive reaction shows that you are easily swayed by the opponent and are not in control of the match. It’s a tricky balance: to show attacking spirit, but attack only on your own terms.

So, what to do if the opponent attacks too often, and you want to impose a more deliberate pace to the match? The way I see it, there are basically two options: ignore the attack or counter-attack.

Ignoring doesn’t mean doing nothing. There are several ways of deflating the opponent’s attack without counter-attacking. One way is to hold a firm kamae and let the opponent impale himself on your shinai (assuming he doesn’t use uchi-zeme to knock your shinai out of the way before going for men). I have seen this done by senior sensei many times during keiko with junior kendoka. It seems a bit arrogant to me to do so, as if the opponent is offering something (a chance to exchange hits in this case), but I am refusing to accept it. Perhaps, this is a manifestation of the evolutionary-developed sense of obligation to accept gifts from strangers and to reciprocate with gifts of our own. Robert Chialdini describes this effect in detail in his book “Influence”. This instinctive reaction to accept favours and to pay back is what makes tourists vulnerable to scams (say, being offered colourful threads as “souvenirs from Africa”) on central streets of major European cities.

Perhaps, this is the way to act at the exam, though – confidently on the verge of arrogance in order to show that you are capable of sticking to your way of fighting regardless of the opponent is throwing at you.

Another course of action in the face of opponent’s attack is, of course, a defence immediately followed by a counter-attack. An important point her is that defence by itself won’t do. There is a saying in kendo: “bogyo no tame no bogyo nashi” – no defence for the sake of defence. The key is, however, not to fall into simply reacting to the opponent’s motions, but to lead him – to actually cause him to attack you (by applying seme) at the moment chosen by you.

So the balance between controlling the match and not reacting to a barrage of attacks is a tricky one. In NAVY SEAL terminology, you need to be both aggressive and situationally aware. Easier said than done.

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The underlying concept applies in all aspects of life, of course, beyond martial arts. As a professional photographer, for example, there is a difference between not missing creative opportunities and compulsively reacting to every request or job offer that comes your way. It is important to always be working on your craft, but sometimes detecting pitches and proposals. Chasing gigs that do not help develop your own style shows your immaturity as an artist – that you are not yet a ‘yondan’. And this is fine, by the way, because there are plenty of opportunities for practice at your current level. And, except for rare occasions, nobody is judging anyway.

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Micro-progress

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Before starting the treadmill for my lunch-break run, I put on my stylish black-and-red wireless headphones. If I forget to to charge them the day before or put them in the wrong bag it throws a major wrench into my workout. I listen to podcasts during my runs. This means that I am not completely focused on improving my running performance. If I were to follow the deliberate practice concepts, I would not want to be distracted by the soundtrack, but concentrate on my technique all the time – being aware of my stride length, pace and ground contact point relative to my center of gravity. Instead, I am half-way there – I follow a training program generated by the Runkeeper app, which keeps challenging me in terms of the distance and pace, but I do listen to non-running related stuff to distract me from the pain of the workout.

On my last run, I listened to an interview with Frank Shamrock, who made some insightful comments about warrior mindset. Although he talked in the context from which the term actually evolved – martial arts, many of the associated tactics became well-known in other fields, like business, sports and healthcare. A significant part of the warrior mindset is striving for self-improvement on a daily basis.

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The ubiquitous concept of kaizen is usually taken to mean “continuous improvement”. Also, in business context it is often understood to involve all aspects of a company’s operation and all of its personnel. Although the Japanese word “kaizen” itself does not include any notions of continuity or all-inclusiveness (it literally means “improvement”), the continuity of practice and improvement is key in martial arts. This is at least part of the reason why there is a default disdain towards “hobbyist kendo” and the view of many high-level Japanese sensei that foreign kendoka have no appreciation for daily practice.

The improvements don’t have to be large. In fact they can be microscopic in the grand scheme of things, and they don’t have to happen in all areas of performance at once, but there needs to be some improvement every day.

Personally, I distinguish between progress in quantity and quality of work. This applies to any field, not just kendo in my case. For example, when I work on post-processing images from a large photoshoot, simply reducing the number of photos in the pipeline is not sufficiently satisfactory for me as a measure of progress. I try to develop new processing techniques and make mental notes about composition and camera settings for future shoots. This way, working on the particular shoot has the benefit of leaving me with improved skills, even in the worst case scenario, say, if the images themselves would never be looked at by the clients ever again.

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Favourite failure

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Failure is an important measure of progress. My violin teacher says I need to throw caution to the wind every so often and play as fluid and as fast as I can, ramping up the speed until something fails, either intonation or bow pressure or one of the other thousand or so technical elements that apparently can mess up the final result. When something does fail, it is important to notice what it is and then start practicing that specific element at a slow and deliberate speed.

There is another type of failure, one that you are not looking for intentionally as part of deliberate practice. It’s the failure that you are trying to avoid, but that happens despite your intentions. There is an argument that even this kind of failure is often good for you in retrospect.

Tim Ferriss has a question that he asks all his podcast guests and that is prominently featured in his new book “Tribe of Mentors”: “What is your favourite failure and what did you learn from it?” I find it insightful to see how the interviewees process what appears to be a failure into something they view as a valuable lesson. More than the specific examples, what fascinates me is how resilient these people are. And, of course, the lessons learned from failures are illustrations of what Steve Jobs famously said: you can connect the dots only looking back.

Extracting useful lessons from failures is hard in general. I can say, though, that the main thing I learned from failing yondan kendo grading this past Saturday was realizing that life goes on after that almost completely unchanged. I can still talk about kendo with friends on the ferry on our way back from Vancouver to Victoria, I can go to see the Nutcracker ballet with my family the following day, I can have a cup of coffee and hot chocolate with my daughter after school at our favourite cafe,.. And, even more significantly, I can do all these things regardless of whether or not I go to grading next year or ever again. So next time, if there is a next time, there is no need to worry… as I keep saying to myself every time.

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Too present to learn

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“You can’t think and hit at the same time.”

– Yogi Berra

I wonder, wouldn’t it be super-productive to apply my analytical skills to learning a physical skill? For example, I could use a fundamental studying technique like note-taking for learning kendo or violin-playing.

However, this is obvious and easy only in principle. In reality, I find that practicing a martial art or music requires so much focus and present-moment awareness that I literally remember very little to take notes of after practice. All my energy, both physical and mental, is spent on doing the thing, not on thinking about it. In fact, I am surprised how some people can ask questions during a kendo practice. Not that that find the answers obvious (mostly, quite the opposite) or the behaviour awkward (even though the structure of a typical kendo practice is not conducive to question-and-answer sessions, we are not in Japan after all). I just don’t find that beyond the very basic level, intellectual understanding of a particular technique is helpful for making progress. It feels like practice is needed at the moment, not another explanation.

I recently came upon a similar reflection in a book I’ve been reading, “A Man in Love” by Karl Ove Knausgaard (which is a fantastic book, by the way – I can’t say that I enjoy any particular aspect of it, and the story is not exciting, but somehow I just know it’s a modern masterpiece, and I cannot stop reading it). There, a writer friend of the main character describes his experience of writing about and training with professional boxers: “You know, the boxers I wrote about had an incredible presence. But that meant they weren’t spectators of themselves, so they didn’t remember anything. Not a thing! Share the moment with me here and now. That was their offer.”

Having said all this, I think there is a way of harnessing the power of analysis. In fact, this is how progress usually happens – at the juncture of previously disjointed fields. Just look at Bruce Lee’s notebooks with all the detailed sketches and notes on the physical, psychological and philosophical aspects of his practice. I think the idea is to separate the two activities in time. Practice first, analyze later. To paraphrase Yogi Berra, you cannot think while hitting, but you can think about how you’ve just hit.

In fact, I was probably wrong, when I said that couldn’t remember anything about the last night’s practice. After all, there are established techniques for helping me remember, to improve my ability to remember:

  • Verbalize the learned concep. If I learned only one thing during last practice, what is that? Assigning words to the idea captures it and gives it some substance. Now it can be studied and analyzed.
  • Do this soon after practice (within the first 24 hours). Make a written note of what you learn.
  • Revisit the note before the next lesson, so you can build upon what you’ve learned during the practice.

In the case of violin practice, things are even simpler – my teacher takes notes while I practice and gives them to me after the lesson.

All these suggestions sound incredibly simple and obvious. This is what we teach our students, who study math, physics and engineering.

Obvious – definitely. Simple? I find them easier said than done. But if nothing else, learning this way is a practice itself.

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Swords and pencils

“It is said the warrior’s is the twofold Way of pen and sword, and he should have a taste for both Ways.”
— Miyamoto Musashi

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A katana, or any Japanese-style blade for that matter (as well as some Middle-eastern blades like in the image above), is similar to a pencil in terms of the principle of its physical construction.

Both a blade and a pencil have hard materials at their core (a katana can have many layers of different hardness, but the general principle is to have a hard metal surrounded by a softer one). For the pencil, it’s the graphite, and for the katana, it’s the steel with high carbon content. For both instruments, the hard core forms the working part, which can be sharpened to a fine point/edge.

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The hard core is enclosed in a relatively soft material – wood in the case of the pencil and low-carbon steel in the case of the sword. Without the outer set shell, neither instrument would be practical to use, because the core it too brittle to withstand the pressure of the artist’s hand or a strike of an enemy’s sword. Likewise, a soft, mono-layered instrument without a core would be a compromise at best in terms of cutting/drawing quality. Think about a bronze sword or a crayon – neither is particularly strong, and neither can be sharpened to a fine point or edge.

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A pencil that we use today is a European invention. Hand-carved wooden holders with graphite core were first made in England in 1564, and a Czech company Kohinoor patented and mass-produced pencils that were very similar to modern ones in the 19th century.

Europeans also made multi-layered blades, but the technique was refined and taken to the level of an art in Japan in middle ages.

I find it curios how these tools from two unrelated fields of application (cutting and writing) evolved along similar design paths, because in both fields similar qualities are valued – sturdiness and ability to be sharpened.

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How to quit

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“Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.”
― Donald Justice

When I first started practicing kendo several years ago, whenever I would meet with Japanese sensei, they would ask: “Why did you begin doing kendo?” Being a foreigner, the answer was always easy: I like Japanese culture, history, food, etc. Recently, I heard a a different question: “Why do you still practice kendo?” My first reply, which I thought was quite funny, was “Because samurai never quit.” Seriously, though, I find this to be a much harder question than the first one, just like sustaining motivation for practice is more difficult than obtaining it initially.

I think this is true with any activity that you have been doing for many years and that has become a big part of your life. You do it “seriously”, as people would call it. Dan Heller even introduced a gradation of levels of seriousness with which amateurs pursue their activities (it was photography in his case): beginner photographer, serious photographer, insanely serious photographer,.. After a while, you begin to realize just how large the part of your life that you are devoting to your activity of choice (photography, kendo, ) really is. It takes a lot of time, money, mental and emotional resources. Becoming any good requires both quality and quantity of practice. I am not saying that the benefits are not worth it, but whatever you invest into the activity does add up, both in the positive and in the negative sense.

You might wonder, “Just imagine how much time I would have if I quit that thing that I have been doing”. Wo-o-o-o… it’s a very un-samurai-like thought, but after all, some of us are also scientists or at least (think that) they like logic, so let’s think it through.


First of all, you might not have to “quit” per se to be able to claw back some time and mental resources. You might be able to dial down the amount of practice, because your experience should enable you to maximize the quality of practice during the remaining sessions. The returns on increasing the amount of naive practice, to borrow the term from Anders Ericsson, are rapidly diminishing anyway, so you might as well replace it with deliberate practice.

Second, even if you quit a highly structured practice regime that has been incorporated into your routine over the years, you might not be able to immediately reclaim all the freed-up time in an efficient manner. For example, when I have a looming deadline on a work-related project and decide to skip a kendo practice in order to get some of the work done, I typically find that the uninterrupted chunk of time that is typically devoted to kendo becomes fragmented by interruptions (usually, procrastination that manifests itself in one form or another) that exist because a routine for alternative work has not been established. So unless you are prepared to quit something for good or at least for a substantial period of time (like taking a six-months sabbatical from your usual activities, which would allow you to genuinely try something new and to make a new habit of it), it is actually not worth doing if your goal is to free up time for other projects.

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Moving on

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In martial arts, for example, in kendo, the term zanshin (literally, ‘remaining spirit’) refers to the state of being brepared to continue to fight immediately after completing a sword cut. At one seminar, an 8th dan kendo sensei explained that this continuous focus and the abcense of breaks in the present moment awareness is the reason why a match that lasts only a few minutes leaves the kendoka dripping with sweat.

Cultivating this ability is important in other aspects of life, from business to research to creative endeavors. For example, Brian Koppelman, the screenwriter of “Rounders“, “Solitary Man” and, more recently, “Billions,” told in an interview that he and his writing partner began researching the next movie idea literally the following day after “Rounders” was released in theatres. They specifically planned for this immediate engagement in routine work to avoid allowing themselves to marinade in their emotional reaction to either the success or the failure of the movie. In another example, which, incidentally, I heard the same day, Barbara Corcoran, the founder of one (if not the) largest real estate company, said that in her experience, the best businessmen/women are different from their peers in that they can recover from setbacks quicker. These “superstars” do not dwell on their emotional reaction to an event in the past. 

I find it interesting that the concept applies equally to a positive result (completion of a painting, receiving a promotion, publishing a research paper, winning a kendo match, etc.) and a negative one (harsh review of a paper, losing a match, etc.) In either case, as soon as you find out the outcome, it becomes a thing of the past. After that, it is time to move on to the next thing.

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