2 Unpopular
Secrets of Success

Dear Friend,

I am only going to address one of these 2 secrets in this issue of the Blast and take a look at the other one in the following month.  First, I want to talk about how training “secrets” become secrets.  Then I will talk about the first secret, and I GUARANTEE you it is absolutely unpopular.

First things first.  Notice I haven’t said anything about unpopular secrets of martial arts or of qi gong or health or of self-defense or weapons.  The reason: training in kung fu and qi gong was considered essential to acquiring success in life.  Not because you would have to make your living by force of arms, but because the training honed in you the things you needed to overcome difficulty, recognize opportunity, and adapt.  Those skills led to success.

Now secrets become secrets for 2 reasons.  1) To control the flow of information.  Many people like to live in a world where they believe that all information should be instantly and freely available, and the internet has helped to encourage that belief.  However, information trading did not explode historically until the emergence of strong copyright laws.  In countries without those protections, there is still a reluctance to engage in trade of information, and those countries lag behind as a result.  2) Cultural change—Let’s say you grow up in a culture where you do 100 pushups every morning.  You have stronger upper body strength as a result, and the martial art that’s developed assumes that you have the body from doing those daily pushups.  Now let’s take your great, great, great grandchildren.  Doing pushups has become uncool.  Your grandchildren are physically weak, and so can not properly execute the martial art.  They don’t put 2 and 2 together, and just conclude the art is flawed, or that somehow people fought funny back then.  Anyone that knows the role that pushups play now has a secret to the performance of the art.

Well, old style Chinese training had two very important secrets to performance.

One secret is obedience.  The other secret is motivation.  Both of the attributes were tested to see if they existed in training candidates, and then were constantly built through struggle.  In fact, if you take a lot the classic “waiting on the temple steps” stories, you will see a test of obedience and motivation.  I went through a similar trial when training with my primary teacher, Soon Jun, who was really just looking for a flaw that would excuse him from having to deal with me!

I want to talk about the extremely unpopular concept of obedience, and how it creates the vital state necessary for rapid learning.

Obedience is a state of emptiness, where you simply do what you are told, and follow the concepts handed to you without question.  This creates a position of rapid absorption, and you take in information at many times the rate of someone who lacks obedience.

A student that is going to develop slowly is one that questions the basic maneuvers or precepts of an art.  That person must challenge each little piece of information, and because of that challenge, the flow of information is extremely slow.  The person will take many more hours to learn basic lessons and will not, in fact, have a deeper learning of the material.

Obedience really challenges basic Western thought, doesn’t it?

Because of the training I provide, I have been blessed in my ability to work with martial artists and qi gong stylists that have already acquired their own expertise before training with me.  The senior experts and masters that I have trained have ALL, WITHOUT QUESTION, been highly obedient.  I understand the mental position that they adopt as a tool for the rapid learning of information, because I do the same exact thing!

Of course, once the bulk of a skill set is acquired, it’s important to then challenge and examine the information—to really break it apart.  This 2 step process allows a full, deep knowledge of an art to emerge.  Doing that before acquiring the information fully, though, is a waste of time and does not lead to success.

There are 3 cautions that you need to keep in mind if you want to gain the power of obedience.  First, obedience can easily be abused as an excuse to preserve power or authority.  Instead, it should be cultivated as a position of ideal learning.  Next, not every teacher is worth becoming obedient to.  Some are charlatans or lacking in skill.  It’s your responsibility to observe or develop an intuitive feel for a person before lending your obedience, but then to lend your obedience when the necessary trust is there.  Lastly, give your obedience consciously.  Make the decision to give it or withdraw, and then stick by your decision.

Next Blast, We’ll talk about the ancient secret of motivation.

Best Regards,

Master Mikel Steenrod

www.h2omt.com