The Gift of Failure

Holiday time usually means frantic shopping and gift giving for some people. Other people take it as a chance to refocus their efforts on trying to help others. I like most people will procrastinate until the very last minute to get gifts for people and I will be doing my best Bagua stepping and evading trying to beat out the other holiday shoppers for gifts.

The best gifts are those that will stay with you long after you have received them from the giver. As a Kung-Fu student there is no better gift than that of failure. It is at the point you fail that you can come face to face with your limitations and work towards overcoming them.

One of our school's Elder Masters has a saying, "Invest in Loss". I took this to mean that you shouldn't be afraid to lose. I later understood that you should be able to invest your time even amidst continuous failure to one day achieve success. Try a technique hundreds or thousands of times before gaining insight into its true application. It sounds so simple but it is one of the hardest things to do in life. To persevere after continuous failure and setback. Most people give up at the first sight of failure. Our egos can't handle not achieving success after the first few tries. Rarely do we persevere and refuse to quit until we have reached our goals. It is closest to the point of success that most people give up.

We live in a society where it is not okay to fail. We try to soften the blow and remove obstacles for people whenever they encounter the risk of failure. This robs people of the ability to learn their strengths and weaknesses and try their best to push past them. Martial Arts teachers and senior students should allow students to fail and encourage them to keep trying. We do our fellow students a great disservice when we do not allow them to fail and are not honest with them when they do.

I have tried incorporating techniques I have learned in sparring. I usually have gotten bruised body parts and a bruised ego trying to apply them. I record my observations and try them until I get them to work in sparring and I can perform the technique automatically. Then I can move on to trying something new and failing again. I am going to keep investing in loss because so far the immediate returns may have not been great but in the long run it pays dividends.