An Insider's View

What Do I Do on A Daily Basis?  Why does it matter to you?

1. Teaching:  Providing instruction and support to student members.  Support includes motivating students, and keeping our feedback to student systems up and running.
2. Training:  My own personal training to keep skill, fitness, and enthusiasm strong and moving forward.  Instructors do not use class times as work out times.  It interferes with the job of coaching, and so maintaining private training times is an important part of the process.
3. Operations:  The daily act of running a business.  Pretty much universal across most businesses.
4. Development: Programs that are being built at Water Mountain, or projects that are being brought online.  For example, the new website would be a project under development, as well as the female kung fu study.

Why is this important to you?

As with any good operation, most of the stuff we do goes on behind the scenes.  Let’s take an example of something that sword members will be familiar with.  The sword is a high stress weapon, and the effect of that stress is most apparent in testing.  It takes many months for a person to execute, under testing stress, safely and at about 65-75% of their ability for a period of 30 minutes.  No one other than other sword practitioners or me, their teacher, sees that effort.  Observers simply see the outcome.  Now, compared to a real exchange where years are translated into a battle of a few seconds, testing isn’t all that bad.

When someone meets me, depending upon what they know about my background and at what time they meet me, they accuse me of at least one of the 4 things:

1. I’m completely impulsive, and act randomly.
2. I’m a systematic machine.
3. I’m hugely talented, and owe my success to genetics.
4. I’m not all that bright, or am largely naïve about the function of the world.

Here’s the truth.  I am a systematic investigator and planner.  Given the time, I will plan and test options before employing them.  Not given the option, I will act.  I act at the moment that I deem action to be necessary or essential.

When I do act, I am a systematic machine.  I systematically dismantle my opposition, without mercy or regard for protest, until I have reached my goal.  I often beat my opposition simply because they quit long before I do.

I am a relentless preparer and self-trainer.  When others sleep, or are on vacation, I am preparing.  This gives me the ability to act on impulse when planning is not possible, and still be successful.

I do not have a need for others to understand me, or know my background.  Others ignorance of my experience or training gives me a serious advantage in conflict.  It also allows me to restrain my ego, and prevent conversations from being about me.  In fact, I will only discuss me when it is necessary as a teaching element.

As a moral choice, I attempt to resolve conflict using reason, negotiations, and education.  This I do, because this is how humans should resolve such issues.  Many times, I know before hand that such an effort will fail, but I believe the gesture is necessary to better humanity.  Sometimes, it will also work even when I expect emotionally that it will fail.  For that reason, I make the attempt.

The point I want to make here is that Water Mountain is not random.  It began impulsively, but has been systematically designed since that impulse.  None of the four activities that I engage in for Water Mountain is arbitrary.

Of the 4 things today, what I want to do is talk about teaching, and what I view as being the fundamental flaw of American teaching in general, and of American martial arts or qi gong in particular.  What is it that gives Water Mountain practitioners their almost universal, rapid growth in skill, and that has other schools thinking that we must have low rank standards to be advancing students so quickly, until they actually see our students perform?

What it’s not is a set of unique techniques.  Chinese martial arts, most martial arts in fact, are hugely similar.  Our secret is simple, we know that we're dealing with humans, and humans need certain things provided to them in order to function at high levels.  When humans get their brains into the right spot, and are properly supported, their development accelerates.  Modern approaches lack that knowledge of reality, and are unwilling to deal with the human, and would much rather regard human problems as things that get in the way of training.

Now, strangely enough, I want to start the second topic.

The rise of robotics—how not to let robots take over your way of thinking.

The South Koreans are rapidly becoming the undisputed world leaders in robotics.  This superiority has been driven by a large decrease in the S.K. birth rate.  You see, the Korean social welfare and retirement system is built around the traditional Korean thought that aging parents and grandparents are cared for by their children.  Without children to take care of the elderly, the government faces the need to install a very expensive social welfare system.  The government of S.K. takes this problem so seriously that it now provides direct financial payments to Korean couples that have children.  The government has also decreed that robots capable of acting as caregivers for the elderly be fully operational by 2014!

Is this a reasonable goal for the Koreans?  Well let’s take a look at what they’ve done in the last 12 months:

1. Introduction of robotic autoguns capable of manning border points alone on the DMZ.
2. Completion of the world’s most sophisticated battle tank, also the most automated.
3. Introduction of surveillance robots to patrol schools and temples.

Yes, they can do it.  The problem in the robot age as it emerges will be in treating humans like they are robots.  This is a problem, because humans already do that in their education.  We already think that learning is as simple as absorbing information in a linear fashion and then performing according to that information.  That is how a machine, a computer, is given instruction and information.  Not a human.

If that assumption were true, wouldn’t humanity in general be performing at very high levels in everything we do?  We’re not.  Humans have to deal with all sorts of behavioral issues in learning and then implementing information.  In the last Blast I talked about motivation, and how important that was, because it affects all learning and all action.

You see, dealing with behaviors isn’t something that gets in the way of training, it is training.