Jewel of the Martial Arts

Shown above is a rough diamond before it is polished. Ip Man’s student Master Wang Kiu said quite often that Wing Chun is a jewel of the Chinese martial arts. But it requires a lot of hard work and dedication to bring this art to perfection so that it can really be made to work. The art itself is dead but the practitioner makes it come alive and has to make it work. Most people give up too easily and don’t put in the time. practice and study to make it work.

Master Wang Kiu said that if you give away an art too easily meaning charging very little or for FREE then people do not appreciate the art as something that has any value. They won’t appreciate the teachers efforts or the art and soon drift off to other schools who may charge very expensive fees but then the student thinks that must be better because better things usually cost more money. So in trying to be nice to students you will always be disappointed when you find out they pay you nothing but they have also joined another school that teaches less but charges $100 a month. We have seen this over and over again.

But that is not the topic of this note. The topic is that sometimes from day one, you can recognize that a student is a jewel among students. The student doesn’t know anything but you see they have an eye for detail and they do everything correctly with very little correction. Other students you tell them day in and day out for many years to stand correctly and still they do not do it. They have no faith that what you are telling them is of any importance so they just do it their own way.

The new student of course knows nothing but you recognize their potential right away. They are like an unpolished diamond which with hard work will outshine everyone else. Often these students will not realize this themselves and thus many potential jewels get lost along the way of any martial arts teacher. Sometimes for these people, life just gets in the way.

A good Karate friend of mine who is a dedicated black belt with more than 20 years in the art , said they have a saying that out of 10,000 students, only one will make it to instructor level.

To make it is of course not easy. A rough figure to become an expert in any field is that it requires about 10,000 hours of work. To reach the Master level is another 10,000 hours of work.

They once asked Beatles Paul McCartney if he thought this was true? He replied yes. He said when they became famous they had put in at least 10,000 hours into their music. But he said you need more than that because various other music bands had also put in that amount of time, yet they were not famous. So luck, charisma, talent, being at the right place and at the right time and many other factors are also required to be an International success.

Sir James Paul McCartney CH MBE is an English singer, songwriter, musician, composer, and record and film producer who gained worldwide fame as co-lead vocalist and bassist for the Beatles. His songwriting partnership with John Lennon remains the most successful in history.

Once we had Master Emin Boztepe for a seminar and he said it was not the number of years you studied martial art but what was important was how many serious hours of correct training went into those hours. By his stories he easily went over the 10,000 hours mark.

Another Master by the name of Kenneth Chng said the reason he was better than us is because to him, we are like and open book. He said he has a mental database of more than 10,000 hands so when he encounters our kind of hands, they are already completely analyzed in his brain. At the first touch he already knows what we are about.

One more thing about jewels. When you have talked to many teachers, read many books, seen many videos you might get numb to it all. But hidden among all the talk and theory might be just one sentence somewhere or one short video sequence somewhere that suddenly opens up a whole new insight for you concerning Wing Chun.

I spoke with a high level Wing Chun expert by the name of Winson Wan, a student of Lok Yiu once. He said that Ip Man did not explain too much or spoon feed his students. A lot of things just had to be discovered by the students themselves. He said there was something that bugged him for about eight years. Day and night he thought about how some senior Wing Chun guy got him all the time. Then one day he just woke up and out popped the answer from his dream. Bruce Lee said a similar thing when he came up with the idea of being like water.