The Journey Within

Everybody’s a beginner at some point in their life. And the goal of the beginner? To be the opposite of a beginner – to be an expert. While everyone is a beginner at some point, they do so with the aim of not being one in the future. Unfortunately, life’s lessons are not always delivered like that. You do not begin to end. You begin because you believe in something, and you want to test out that belief. Although the initial goal may seem obvious at the time of beginning, the end result might not be what you actually plan to achieve.

Having said that, it’s quite refreshing to see a beginner coming into class. You look at him as though you were looking at yourself, some time back. You look at his clumsiness, his confusion, his eagerness to look the part while not making a fool of himself…

Then I realise that all these characteristics are still present within myself, only more subtle. You see, the beginner exaggerates the mistakes, the discomfort. Over the years, I have learnt to mask some of those discomfort. Some muscles have built up to defend the discomfort, making me appear to have “got it” when in fact I haven’t. I’ve only learnt how to appear to have “got it”.

The beginner then showed me the true me, as though I was looking at a truth mirror (sounds very much like The Mirror of Erised, if you’re a Potter Fan). The beginner lets me know that I’m also still a beginner. We are both trying to understand something that’s unfamiliar. The interpretation of the unfamiliar may be different, but we are essentially seeking some kind of knowledge and understanding. I face the same frustrations as the beginner, although it maybe at a different level as I have worked out some of the kinks.

It sounds frustrating when you realise you have not improved much from the image of the beginner, staring back at you, mocking your own progress. But it’s nice as a rude awakening, to remind you that there’s a long way to go, and that in the path of learning, you’ll always need to be humble, so that you can learn from the expert, as well as from the beginner.

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I stood up my teacher, with a last minute notice. No wonder he scolded me. It wasn’t intentional, but I was torn between family and learning Tai Ji. Sometimes Tai Ji wins, sometimes family wins. Continue reading »

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I recently lent my copy of the Blue Ocean Strategy to an entrepreneur, who created a blue ocean strategy himself without realising it! I’m envious of the action he took for the theory that I only found out through books, my main hideout. I don’t want to be a two-legged bookshelf. Fortunately, I’m also practising the Blue Ocean Strategy.

I first blogged about the blue ocean strategy and how it applied to a business like hairdressing. My dad actually pointed out a different view on using the blue ocean strategy, on personal life!

The Blue Ocean Strategy proposes companies to not fight head-to-head with competition, but to create a whole new market that leaves the question of competition irrelevant, until later of course, when the “competitors” see how good your business is doing. So how can this strategy be used in a personal life?

There are plenty of battles that are fought, some big, some small, some literal, some not so obvious. But we are constantly in battle – what meal should I have tonight, where should I go this weekend, should I be working in this area, am I spending enough time with my family, should I be watching my health, should I be blogging now, should I be reading this blog?

We unconciously set up rules to fight these battles. Rules like, “I only have so much money this month, so I can only spend on this, this and this” or “I need to get a bigger Christmas present for my brother since he’s helped me much this year”.

So how do we fight these battles using Blue Ocean Strategy?

I draw a recent experience deciding whether to go visit my parents who are 300km away. I haven’t seen them for close to 2 months and thought it’s time to go back. The hesitation came from the bad traffic at immigration, due to a recent tightening of security. Each car is expected to wait between 2 to 3 hours, before the 300km journey even begins! I believe the time could be better spent elsewhere. Then I decided that instead of going during rush hour, I would go just after lunch, before the traffic begins to pile up in the evening.

It was the smoothest ride I had traveling back to visit my parents. I chose not to fight the “competition” and used the pocket of time with least resistance. I didn’t create a blue ocean, merely identifying it and capitalising on it.

Have you swam in your own personal blue ocean strategy lately?

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Deadlines. Bad project management. Bad combination. This is the time when you start to wonder why things don’t work the way they’re suppose to work, and a lot of the times, you realise that history finds its way to invade the present rather than stay in the past, just like our QWERTY keyboard.

So what happens when things don’t work? You start to enhance them, change them, but still based on the old paradigm, based on the existing infrastructure, until there comes a tipping point when you find that the existing infrastructure just can’t take any more patch jobs. It’s art when it’s a patched quilt. It’s torture when it’s a patched system.

Yet we still patch them, over and over again. Each additional patch will have to be remembered somehow because any new patch will need to take into account how the old patch work. Most of the times, to reduce time devising such a patch, we do a “copy and paste”, then add a few more lines of code to that. Then we estimate the time to do just that, and test the other systems so that this new code didn’t affect how the old ones work.

And here lies the thing that’s bothering me. If the system takes 5 man months to change, it takes 5 man months to change. If a process for a group of people takes 5 days, and you need it yesterday, it’s perfectly acceptable to expect this group of people to deliver it the next day.

Technology seems to have a higher status than humans. Technology can throw up their hands and say “I can’t do it in time” and we’ll accept such a thing. When humans do that, we are weak, not efficient, not effective, not productive, not loyal, not motivated, not… <fill in your own self-help jargon>.

Why have we been relegated to such a status? Why do we discriminate against our own kind? Why do we idolise technology instead?

I fear we may be less trusting than I’ve previously thought. We don’t trust the decision made by anyone else except ourselves. If someone said “it’s a 5-day job”, you would compare and see if it really takes 5 days. After a while, the level of distrust will escalate because if I say 5 day, you’d tell me to do it in a day, I’ll say 10 days so that you might discount it to 5. The distrust works both ways. If you don’t trust my estimate, I don’t trust your decision and I don’t give you a true estimate, and you will never trust my estimate etc…

How do we go round this conundrum? I think someone has to start. I’ve been known to trust people too easily, but sometimes, you just have to do it to see where it goes. Maybe later, I’ll be more cynical and pessimistic that I’ll start withdrawing myself into a clamshell. At least I’m moulding a pearl in it, to come out when my layers of defense have hardened.

A pearl can be bought and sold. Trust can’t. You just have to give to receive.

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My teacher encourages us to learn from all, teachers and students alike. Teachers are just formalised labels by institutions such as colleges, universities, and martial art schools. Students are those that these teachers serve because without the students, there is no one to teach.

It’s good to say all these. But sometimes, that’s all that happens – saying. The doing part is often met with conflicting messages.

There’s a very old Chinese saying,

三人行，必有我师。

Translated as, for every 3 person walking together, there’s bound to be a teacher to me, i.e. for a very long time, we have recognised that teachers are everywhere. So what keeps them from appearing to you and me?

I think there are 2 main reasons – our own perception, and the environment we are in.

Our own perception

We only learn what we perceive. If we can’t perceive it, we can’t learn it. If we close our minds to the possibility of learning from everyone, we won’t be able to learn from them. This may happen if you just dislike the person for any reason, or if you think you are already superior, or if the environment you’re in does not promote such perception, which brings us to the next point…

The environment we are in

A teacher can promote or guide the class to be more receptive to other students. However, if the teacher himself does not allow “the opportunity to learn from others” to flourish, all will be lost. We may hear a teacher lecture first about the importance of learning from others, but then when the teacher starts to point out the mistakes of students at annoyingly frequent intervals, it’ll impede the ability of students to see those mistakes for themselves, and hence will not be able to learn from others.

It is tough to preach the fine line of guiding and yet not appear too prescriptive, especially when different stages of life require different kinds of teaching. So, this is still all talk. If you find yourself or your teacher who’s already walking the talk, you’ve just found yourself a great gift.

p/s: It’s quite refreshing to hear a teacher’s voice on this, that a teacher’s greatest gift to a student is to teach them how to understand teachers and teaching. Please read this post from The Guru Handbook for more details.

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