“Practice every day.”
“Finish the number of reps the teacher calls out.”
“Don’t give up.”
That’s what it takes to practice martial arts. Look: no one can do it the first time. No one is good at every style and every weapon. People think martial arts is cool and that the talented just take to it. I know it seems that way: my master came from a family of martial artists. My current teacher was chosen along with thousands of students to be trained—and every year, half the students were dismissed until only an elite team remained. But none of the great martial artists got good without doing thousands of movements every day. I do that too—and I’m still not where I want to be.
I watch teachers plead for people to just practice three times a week. I read articles urging a mere ten minutes a day. I hear students cheerfully say that they don’t practice between classes. It shows. If you want to get good, you have to practice thousands of reps a day—and realize that you’ll do it again tomorrow because you’re still a work in progress.
My master said: “Discipline is freedom.”
Practice is a matter of self-cultivation. If aging means that I need to change my diet, attend to my sleep, exercise more, secure my cognitive stimulation, and reinforce my relationships, I can do that. It’s far better to say, “I’ll work on that,” than to say, “give me a pill,” or, worse, “there’s nothing to be done about it.”
When a disciplined person must do something that will take a long time to achieve, they will stick with it. Therefore, they have the freedom to be who they want to be. The undisciplined person won’t follow the necessary steps over a long period of the time, and so they suffer and gradually grow more constrained. As an illustration, doctors tell me that the majority of patients don’t do all the physical therapy, dietary recommendations, or even take their medicine. If you check any prescribed treatment, you’ll see probabilities of success rates. Well, if you don’t take care of yourself, the probability of failure is obvious.
Discipline is freedom.