What can Mozart teach you?

Learning from the Masters in Martial Art.

What can Mozart teach you?

In the early 1990’s I didn’t really have a teacher anymore. I had probably spent $20,000 learning Wing Chun by travelling to Vancouver every weekend, renting a place to stay, ferry costs, club fees and on top of that buying every book and video on the subject of Wing Chun. That total money spent also included some later money spent on subsiding seminars for various students who didn’t or couldn’t pay.

So lacking any higher level teacher our club was starting to stagnate so we decided to go the seminar approach. There was no YouTube channel to look at in those days. When I learned the wooden dummy, that knowledge was still a secret.

Now reflecting back on things, what did we really learn? I would say we learned lots of things on the theory side and it opened up our minds to the fact that there is not just one good Wing Chun lineage or one best fighting art. No, there are hundreds of good ones.

Imagine learning a year of boxing and then having Mike Tyson give a seminar at your boxing club. What do you think you could learn that would really do you much good? I would say really next to nothing. Definitely he could demolish your whole club and dazzle you with his skills. But what would you actually get out of it that your teacher could not teach you?

Tyson is good because of his hours and hours of sweat at the gym, his road work, his super expert coach, his genetics and body size and build, his rough upbringing and his very aggressive mental attitude and not being afraid of any human on the face of the earth (in a boxing ring with boxing rules). Unless you had all those same factors, you could never hope to be like him.

That’s about what I conclude after having met so many Masters of martial art. To me, all of them were like a seminar given by Mozart after having studied a couple of years of piano. Or if you are into Chess, having Bobby Fisher who was the world champion and who probably spent 10 hour a day studying Chess give you a private lesson about chess. You would come away with what? Nothing. Unless you really had the time that it took those Master to develop the skills that they taught.

For the fighting Master,  you could copy and mimic what these people did but to pull those things off in a real fight you need to have the experience, the right positioning, timing, sensitivity, awareness, speed, power and many more things than that.   

The skill that these people have was gained from hard work. That’s the definition of good Kung Fu. Good Kung Fu is a skill that you acquire from hard work. If you don’t do the hard work then you will never obtain the skill. Hard work takes lots of time, dedication and discipline. Most students understand that from their academic studies.  Successful business people are successful not by luck but often from hours and hours of hard work and lots of failures along the way until finally they find the royal road to success.

My Wing Chun teacher Dr. G.K.Khoe, was very good at fighting against Taekwondo. But were we, his students? No. We didn’t put in the time he did sparring against Taekwondo.  One Master we met was maybe the best in Europe. He probably had 20,000 hours of training to make him that good.  He taught us some very good stuff but even what he taught, never actually occurred in any of our lives or in anything we practiced at our club. In martial arts the techniques are endless, infinite in number. Some expert can just talk about a very small subject of these. That subset may never occur.

I think the best is really to become good at your art from your own teacher , who you maybe still never be able to match because of the hours he was able to put into his studies.  Really you get the basics down good by practicing with your training partners and who are just like you. Skill is acquired in small steps and plateaus are very common in learning any kind of art. At first in martial art, you learn a lot. Then suddenly your learning seems to stop and at that time most students get frustrated and finally quit. We noticed that this happens at about the two or three year level if not after just a couple of months. It helps to just lower you expectations a bit and just be happy with small gains in skill.

A passion for martial arts is not for everyone. There are many things in life that demand our attention which could be work, family, kids, an illness, school studies etc. That’s why in any field, only a few can make it to the top. I would say that for those few, then having an expert or Master as a mentor is important and then you have to commit to the time and money to do that.

For most people I would say don’t worry about all the experts and super heroes on Youtube and just do what you can do. Don’t be impressed with a 250 pound athlete who can beat up all his students. Look at his worst students and see what they can do. If they are not too bad, then probably this teacher is very good. It doesn’t matter what your teacher can do. It matter what he can make you able to do. Even if you never really become good but the teacher inspired you to do martial art as a lifetime hobby, then that’s pretty good.