Talent is Over-rated by Geoff Colvin

I. Deliberate Practice

1. activity designed specifically to improve performance, often with a teacher's help

2. it can be repeated a lot

3. feedback is continuously available

4. It's highly demanding mentally

5. it isn't much fun

Think of how a comedian puts together a 2 hour act. Bit by bit, in front of small crowds, over months and months.

II. Luck

III. Environment

Oddly, the effect of all this deliberate drudgery is the emergence of rapt attention, not falling asleep at the wheel.

QUESTION

Why does anyone put themselves through this drudgery??????

ANSWER

Rewards. Intrinsic and extrinsic rewards.

Creative people are focused on "How can I solve this problem?" rather than "What will solving this problem do for me?" Creative people are hooked on "flow." These are the intrinsic rewards.

Extrinsic rewards play a role too.

1. recognition that confirms competence

The prospect of being judged reduces creativity; personal feedback enhances it. Personal feedback needs to be:

1. constructive

2. non-threatening

3. work-focused rather than person-focused

People want to pursue exciting ideas and the intrinsic rewards that arise from that pursuit.

People will work most passionately and effectively on projects that they choose for themselves.

The Corporate world is set up to prevent this. You're told what you did wrong but not how to do better. Your specific personal traits (attitude, personality) are targeted in evaluations. Rewards come with more responsibilities but not more freedom.

The MULTIPLIER EFFECT

A small advantage may lead to a great advantage through numerous intermediate steps. For instance, a beginner's skills are modest and they can only tolerate a little deliberate practice. That small increase in deliberate practice leads to greater skills which then gives rise to more deliberate practice.

paleolithic nutrition - duplicating t...

paleolithic nutrition - duplicating the evolutionary metabolic milieu

PaNu - A modified paleolithic diet that can improve your health by duplicating the evolutionary metabolic milieu.

How do you do it?

Here is a 12- step list of what to do. Go as far down the list as you can in whatever time frame you can manage. The further along the list you stop, the healthier you will be. There is no counting, measuring, or weighing. You are not required to purchase anything specific from me or anyone else. There are no special supplements, drugs or testing required.*

1. Eliminate sugar (including fruit juices and sports drinks) and all foods that contain flour.

2. Start eating proper fats - Use healthy animal fats or coconut fat to substitute fat calories for carbohydrate calories that formerly came from sugar and flour. Drink whole cream or coconut milk.

3. Eliminate gluten grains. 

4. Eliminate grain and seed derived oils (cooking oils) Cook with Ghee, butter, animal fats, or coconut oil.

5. Favor ruminants like beef, lamb and bison for your red meat. Eat some fish.

6. Get daily midday sun or take 4-8000 iu vit D daily

7. Try intermittent fasting or infrequent meals (2 meals a day is best). Don't graze like a herbivore.

8. Most modern fruit is just a candy bar from a tree. Stick with berries and avoid watermelon which is pure fructose. Eat in moderation.

9. Eliminate legumes

10. Adjust your 6s and 3s. Pastured (grass fed) dairy and grass fed beef or bison minimizes excess O-6 fatty acids and are better than supplementing with 0-3 supplements. A teaspoon or two of Cod Liver oil is good compensatory supplementation if you stick with supermarket beef.

11. Proper exercise - emphasizing resistance and interval training over long aerobic sessions

 

12. Eliminate all remaining dairy including cheese- (now you are "Orthodox paleolithic")

 

No counting, measuring or weighing is required, nor is it encouraged.

Meditation and A Purposeful Practice at West LA Seido

Life has always been complex and challenging. The challenges today are just different than what they were in the past. Nowadays instead of hunting and scavaging for food and living in the elements we’re bombarded with suggestions and demands from our highly sophisticated societies. How is it possible to find harmony amidst what are often contradictory messages?!

The purposeful practice of Seido karate-do offers you a simple method for removing the “mental clutter” that accumulates in life. The program helps you achieve the clarity and effectiveness you’re looking for on your journey toward self-fulfillment and a meaningful life. These are big claims! Seido backs them up.

The Seido program works on many levels. The simple but powerful movements serve to organize your thoughts, focus your body and, ultimately, connect you to your best self. The kata (forms) present a rich platform for individual self-discovery, while the partnered work establishes a basis for learning with others. Our meditation program encourages a form of “mental housekeeping” that works with and amplifies the movement practices to produce more effective and efficient thinking.

While the Seido program requires physical exertion and mental alertness, the real power of the practice grows without asking anything from you but consistency. Done on a regular basis, transformations start taking hold below the surface of your everyday awareness, where they nurture and sustain an ever-deepening connectedness to life. The transformations aren’t to be believed. They’re to be experienced!

On the physical level you’ll grow stronger and your movements more integrated. You’ll begin to develop a recognizable “presence” that surges deep from within. This presence alone will invite connection with others.

Mentally, you grow skillful at discarding ineffective habits of thinking and, through skillful focusing of your attention, devote your energy to those things in life which you value most.

Spiritually, the connectedness that infuses your actions opens you to the energy around you, allowing for an authentic appreciation of all that life has to offer not only for you, but for everyone.

In a culture that can embrace irony at the expense of authenticity, Seido’s purposeful practice offers you a direct path to your own truth and supplies you with the confidence to embrace it.

West LA Seido's Approach to "Self-defense"

West LA Seido Karate-do embeds its personal protection program into its on-going classes. Private instruction in this aspect of Seido can also be arranged with Kyoshi on an individual basis.

Personal protection, i.e. self-defense, at Seido uses a model of escalating stages of conflict resolution starting with avoidance behaviors, advancing to verbal de-escalation skills and finally, if no other option is left, introduction of high impact physical measures. In the first two stages, your intention is to defuse the conflict quickly and resolve the misunderstanding in a non-violent, effective manner. Only when these avenues have been exhausted would one resort to physical engagement.

Any “self-defense” program worth its salt starts by having the student develop increased awareness of their surroundings. There’s a good reason for starting here. Avoiding predators is the most effective, safest approach to self-defense in existence. Don’t let anyone tell you differently. But in order to avoid the “bad guys”, you need to know how to look for them. The West LA Seido program places a high value on this "widget" in your personal protection toolbox. Our program trains you in simple but effective practices that heighten and hone your surveillance skills to keep you out of harm’s way.

Almost as important as the awareness of your surroundings is the awareness of yourself. Some people present themselves to the world in such a way that they attract a predator. These people are the proverbial “mugger’s target.” The personal protection program at West LA Seido teaches you how to present yourself in the world so that the predators lurking among us see you as a “hard target” and walk away from you without incident.

If you are to be selected as a target, for whatever reasons, predators often use verbal interactions as “stepping stones” to gain access to your personal space. Using the highly acclaimed work of Gavin de Becker, Marc MacYoung and William Fairbairn, West LA Seido will introduce you to the concepts of “closing" and "entering”, terms that describe how a predator approaches his prey. Our methods will show you what to do about it.

Fighting is always the last resort. As the law enforcement community says, “If you’ve come to the point of fighting, you’ve done a lot wrong already.” Fighting is an indication that your “tip of the spear” self-defense skills, awareness and verbal de-escalation, need improvement. Be that as it may, stuff happens. When it does, keep it simple. West LA Seido will train you in a simple but brutally effective approach to physical combat. Our program also informs you of what the legal consequences of violent behavior are in our society. Beware. They aren't pretty! And they’re just one more reason to develop a diverse skill set to deal with uninvited aggression. Seido’s program will give you those skills.

West LA Seido's Approach to Competition

Competition and cooperation are two modes of interaction that engage us throughout our lives. West LA Seido Karate recognizes the need for being skillful at both. We channel the cooperative instinct in the dojo in a variety of ways, ritual courtesy being the most visible. We also give our competitive nature its due. In weekly sparring classes and periodic tournaments throughout the year, the West LA Seido program provides the eligible student with sufficient opportunities to “test” her or himself in controlled but intense contests.

The word competition comes from Latin, where it meant “to seek with.” In Seido Karate-do, when we compete we remember that we improve quicker and surer with our opponent or training partner’s challenging presence in the dojo. Competition seen from this perspective becomes a way in which we, with our training partners, “seek together” to improve. We use each other in this intentional, mutually acknowledged process on our way to attaining our separate goals. Such a conscious process creates a deep bond with others and from that bond we can feel respect for them as well as for ourselves.

West LA Seido's Approach to Improving Your Fitness

The point of any workout is to stress your body and initiate an adaptive training response. Period.

What are appropriate levels of stress necessary to achieve the adaptive response? In terms of the cardiovascular system, studies have shown that it usually takes about two minutes to get the heart rate into the training zone. Once there, the heart shows an adaptive response after five more minutes of training in the zone. Total minutes needed to get an adaptive response from your heart? Seven.

That’s the floor of the adaptive response component. What’s the ceiling, meaning, beyond what point is any additional work not producing an adaptive response? Twenty-five minutes, according to the sports physiologists.

So a workout in your training zone (anywhere from 60 to 100% of your maximum heart rate) lasting anywhere between 7 and 27 minutes is sufficient to maximize your heart’s adaptive response. Do this twice or three times a week and your fitness will soar without eating into your already crammed schedule.

At Seido we use these parameters to guide our conditioning program. We employ variety in our training sessions to keep it interesting and to keep stimulating adaptive responses. In some classes we use the Tabata Protocol, which calls for maximum exertion for 20 seconds, rest for 10 seconds, repeat for 5-8 sets. Basic calisthenics like the squat thrust + knees raises + multiple punches serve to raise the level of exertion to maximum. These movements are easily learned but very demanding on all the major muscle groups. Done “all out” it’ll leave you gasping for breath. Doing the “20-10s” twice a week is enough to get an optimal adaptive response, meaning it costs the least in terms of time spent on it and produces the most in terms of physiological benefit.s.

Of course, we also train basic karate techniques, such as punches, kicks and grabs, as well as all the forms and partnered drills. Once the adaptive response portion of a class is finished we move to these karate techniques and do them at a slower, more meditative pace. The purpose of going slow with the technique practice is allows the trainee to model biomechanical efficiency, which then transfers to “real life” action. We also train on the heavy bag to model biomechanical effectiveness. We want you to feel that any technique you practice will have some pop in it while going about it in a way that will enhance you mastery and elevate your spirit.

First Karate class! 

Is There A Tiger In Your Tank?

What's your training about? Would any of it matter if your life depended upon it? If not, what is your training providing you with?

These are fundamental questions and your answers to them will determine how you train. Above all, your answers will reflect or require a particular mindset to suit your purpose. The mindset is the mental-emotional framework of your training. Surprisingly, knowledge or development of a suitable mindset is often neglected in martial arts training. Instead, emphasis placed almost entirely on the physical aspect of training, the strategies and techniques of the waza. This over-emphasis on the physical is much to the detriment of the trainee and his or her development.

Hunter Armstrong (now there's a name for you!) was co-founder, with the late Donn Draeger, of the International Hoplology Society. Hoplology is the student of combat and takes its name from the "hoplite", the foot soldiers of the ancient Pelopenessian (Greek) culture. Hunter Armstrong's knowledge of ancient and current close combat approaches is such that he is regularly contracted by the U.S. Military to provide training to soldiers prior to their leaving for battle assignments. His knowledge base was used by Steven Pressfield as a resource for faithfully describing Spartan military practices in Pressfield's tremendous novel, Gates of Fire, which retells the story of the battle of Thermopylae where over two thousand years ago the elite forces of the Greek city-states, mostly Spartans, managed to repel the invading Persian army (and navy) at the strategic chokepoint of Thermopylae in the north of Greece. What remains remarkable about that story to this day is the severe disadvantage from which the Spartans fought. The Persian forces numbered close to 1 million men. The Spartans, who stayed and fought to their deaths to successfully thwart the Persian advance, numbered in the hundreds.

According to Armstrong, when talking about the appropriate mindset for combat "we are talking about the cool, calm, collected mindset of the predator stalking and dominating its prey." This sort of language is politically quite incorrect. We are used to more attenuated explanations of what combat training is all about. Nevertheless, what Armstrong writes has the ring of truth to it. He encourages us to think of the tiger stalking its prey. The tiger, Armstrong writes, is not emotionally aroused; it is not angry or fearful. It does not hate its prey. And after the attack there is no dance of celebration, no sense of "I kicked that deer's butt!" The tiger shifts from predator to diner without note.

Armstrong writes that the combative mindset is characterized by several elements. First, there is imperturbable mind, what the Japanese call fudo shin. Fudo shin is an impersonal approach to the situation. There is no anger. The adversary is simply someone who must be dominated. The notion of dominating awareness flows directly from the impersonal, implacable approach of the true soldier. This is more than simple awareness of one's situation. This is an awareness with the intent to dominate. Combative intent flows from such an awareness. This intent is characterized by the will to initiate and follow-through as necessary in order to complete the task. Next comes something Armstrong calls "Neuro-drive," the capacity to move explosively at the right moment to engage and finish as quickly as possible. In the process of engagement there should be minimal to no verbal contact with the adversary and no eye contact. Eye contact tends to lead to emotional arousal, as anyone who's ridden the New York City subways can tell you.

The mindset that Armstrong details is rarely encountered in the dojo. It is, of course, the mindset of a killer, not a fighter. Entering into such an extreme mindset is not something most of us are interested in, and this is a good thing. But acknowledgement of what is actually required in a do-or-die situation should be part of the trainee's practice. How this can be done in a socially acceptable way will be the subject of the next post. Gambatte kudasai! See you in the dojo.

Buddha by Pond 

A Way Out of the Overload

How do we simplify? There's a welter of information, advice, techniques, schools and every imaginable video tape available on the market to answer that question for you. In making a selection from this movable feast you'd want to take into account the background and credentials of the person offering you a way out of the overload. That's assuming you didn't just throw up your hands in exasperation and walk away from the task entirely.

I recently encountered a credible voice amidst the tumult. Richard Machowicz was a member of the U.S. Navy Seals. Having left the service he continues to work in the field of personal protection and teaches an intensive workshop in Southern California as he trains to become initiated as a Buddhist monk. That's a pretty strong curriculum vitae for cutting through the crap, wouldn't you say?

Richard Machowicz has written a book, Unleash the Warrior Within, which may serve as a modern day karateka's Guide to the Perplexed. Machowicz is a reductionist in the sense that he's an advocate for "thin slicing," the term Malcolm Gladwell popularized in his best-selling book Blink. Thin slicing allows a person to rapidly assess a novel situation and identify the important, noteworthy elements in that situation that need to be addressed first as it unfolds. The emphasis is on the word "rapidly."

I've written at length in other posts about Budo, the aspect of martial arts training that introduces a meditative and aesthetic counterbalance to the havoc of combat. This post will look, with Machowicz's help, at the other end of the "Bu stick", the end occupied by bujutsu, the techniques and doctrine of close-quarter combat.

Machowicz's most important contribution, in my opinion, is his emphasis on target practice. Rather than getting bogged down in what to do, the trainee would benefit enormously if instead he or she was very clear about what to hit. Once that decision is made, the body does what it must to get a successful outcome. This simple fact is often overlooked in training where, just like with the smorgasbord of self-help books, the trainee can get bogged down in a worry of waza.

Machowicz reminds us that most vital targets are on or near the midline of the body; eyes, nose, throat, solar plexus, groin, instep of the feet. Our main targets will dictate how we move and what weapons we use. Such advice is useful even for the trainee who is interested primarily in tournament fighting or dojo sparring, with personal protection being somewhat less of an interest. Of course the eyes, throat and groin are off limits in most tournaments, but maintaining an awareness of the opponent's midline as well one's own serves the trainee well in developing concentration and effective choice of weapons (forefist, knife hand, spear hand, elbow, foot, knee, etc.).

Taking this approach to training, the novice can make significant progress from the get go. The more experienced trainee can also find refuge in this simple approach. Rather than involving ourselves in complex motor plans that lead to nowhere, we can get out from under the overload of choice by simply selecting a target and using the weapons best suited for striking it. Simple to say, not so easy to do. But worth the effort to practice. Gambatte kudasai! See you in the dojo!

Leaf in Yard 

The Fog of Will

Suki = a chink in the armor, a psychological weakness. Doubt.

The trainee must believe in his or her ability to win in a life threatening situation. The trainee must begin to believe that he or she can and will survive a violent encounter because they’ll do what’s necessary, come what may. To achieve this strength of belief the trainee seeks to eliminate excess baggage and change his or her self-perception from one that coddles doubt to one that embraces action. Shugyo, intense training, strips the trainee of excess baggage (doubt) by bringing him or her to the brink of failure and, there and then, allowing for the choice: stop or continue? By continuing, the trainee builds not only physical strength but a mindset that will not shrink from a challenge.

Choosing to continue is often easier said than done. Through the rigors of training, the trainee comes to recognize that there are certain trip wires, or limits, to persistance that recur with dismaying regularity. Many of these limits have been self-imposed. These trip wires constitute the main enemy to progress and are the suki, the chink in the armor, that the trainee must continually engage and correct.

Engaging these walls of inner resistance, the trainee begins to realize that the battle will not be won via the products of intellect. Instead, victory more often arises from the fog of will, the unthinking commitment to persistance. Will's closest advisor is not the intellect but the intuition. Intuition is the result of experience. Shugyo provides the opportunity to experience both victory and, more importantly, defeat. By tasting defeat in the harsh but caring confines of the dojo, the trainee lives to train another day, a day enriched by the insights taught by failure. By returning to the dojo after defeat, the trainee builds the mindset necessary to prevail. It is somewhat ironic that failure is the necessary ingredient for success. More important than failing, of course, is the will to persist once failure has been encountered. While planning is essential ("If you fail to plan, you're planning to fail.") life is often indifferent to the schemes of the intellect. Best to make careful plans AND to train the mindset of "persistance through resistance" that whole-hearted shugyo produces. Gambatte kudasai! See you in the dojo.

Senpai Tomoko, Kayo and Yumi in California 

Beauty and The Beast

The Japanese word yugen connotes the sense of subtlety as it relates to beauty. According to Donn Draeger, author of many books and articles on the history of Budo, the definition of yugen includes such ideas as “suggestiveness,” “charm,” and “dynamic stillness.” Draeger writes that “the essence of yugen lies in beauty and gentleness, the tranquility and elegance of a performance executed in a serene manner. Yet it is not enough to witness and learn about yugen from others,” Draeger observes. “Yugen is thoroughly understood only through one’s own sustained efforts.”

What do beauty and gentleness have to do with karate-do?.

Entering the Seido dojo, the trainee enters the realm of budo first and foremost. Technical development and the use of aggression are addressed, of course, but the primary mission of Seido is the trainee’s personal development. Strength, flexibility, power and coordination are all highly valued physical attributes but if they are put in the service of brute force, domination and fear they fall short of moving the soul and the spirit to its fullest expression. How then, does the trainee minimize the presence of fear and the impulse to impose force while training, at the same time, to maximize physical powers and the very ability to impose force? Two answers to the question of beauty and the beast come to mind.

The first is the “exercise” of courtesy, rei in Japanese. Demonstrating courtesy may be as demanding a practice as any physical regimen found in the dojo. It is certainly a pervasive component of Seido and demands the trainees attention. Through attention to courtesy, the trainee is able to enter into a fuller communion with others. Courtesy requires interaction with another or with others. Through the power of affiliation, nurtured by simple courtesies and acknowledgements within the dojo, the spirit is charmed. This is one reason why traditional formality is emphasized in a Seido dojo. Such formality, done with a humble attitude absent the fussiness of Emily Post, charms the spirit and elevates it at the same time. It encourages a gentleness.

The second “exercise” is kata and, more specifically the kamae, or presentation. Kata is often the source of much consternation for the trainee. The movements of the kata seem strange and ineffectual at first and there is a lack of appreciation for why these “things,” the kata themselves, need to be learned. Adding to this stress is the fact that the trainee’s performance of kata is constantly being judged by the instructor. The trainee is always aware of the instructor’s watchful eye in the dojo. There is a reason for such watchfulness. The instructor is attending to the trainee's state of mind as expressed through their movements and the intervals between the movements, the kamae. Many newcomers to a traditional dojo are slow to see the interplay between movement and stillness. Their first goal is to learn how to move adroitly, and well it should be. Yet as the trainee progresses he or she comes to understand that the kamae (sometimes referred to as stances or "dachi") have as much, if not more, value with respect to their inner development . The ability to maintain equanimity in the face of challenges is widely perceived as the hallmark of self-mastery. Circumstances should not be allowed to gain such a grip on the mind and emotions of the trainee that it disturbs their sense of composure. Of course, this is easier said than done. Kata practice, with its periods of intense action and seeming stillness flowing one into the other, is the perfect occasion for the trainee to experience the meaning of "yugen." The process is an internal one. Yet after much practice the inner equanmity within the violent action seeps out to the surface and is visible to the instructor, if not to everyone else in the class. Dynamic stillness, indeed, becomes apparent.

Sustained effort is the path to all accomplishments. Equanimity is the flower of your effort. Gambatte kudasai! See you in the dojo.

Bird of Paradise 

Take It On

Many critics of Traditional Martial Arts (TMA) base their criticisms on the training methodology of the “old school.” Kata and pre-arranged partnered sets, they say, don’t prepare the trainee for anything “real.” The approach of TMA, they continue, is based on assumptions about an attack that just don’t stand up to what happens in a real close quarter confrontation. No one, for example, would ever punch from the chamber position, nor would anyone ever assume a zenkutsu dachi before initiating an attack.

Of course, these critics are right. Artifacts of TMA training such as the chambering of the hands or feet and the assumption of a particular stance prior to attacking have no place in a fight. What these critics overlook, however, is that such artifacts aren’t intended to address fighting any more than a Marine’s parade drill is intended to produce marksmanship.

The intention of kata practice or partnered rehearsal of punch-block-kick combinations is the development of unit cohesion and the production of a heightened motor control that, in turn, improves conscious awareness. This kind of practice seeks to avoid setting off the blind brainstem reflexes that are programmed to “kick in” during a real threat situation. Provocation of the brainstem reflexes, however, is exactly what TMA’s critics militate for. That is, they're all for going “live” during training.

Why not train the brainstem reflexes if they are in fact the ‘cavalry’ that will save your life while the rehearsal-based martial artist gets dragged off by the enemy with his or her hand frozen in chamber position?

The first and simplest answer is that reflexes don’t need to be trained. They are, by definition, reflexes. It would make as much sense for you to train to sneeze. In a similar vein, when a loud sound goes off close-by, people will either automatically duck to avoid or perk their heads up to see what’s happening. These two options, flexion or extension, are built into the nervous system without any conscious oversight from the trainee. They would come to your aid even if you didn’t want them to. Reflexes can grow dull without periodic challenges, it’s true, and a round or two of kumite with a partner whose skills are better than yours on a periodic basis will suffice to recalibrate those rusty reflexes. But recalibration is not ‘training.’

Those advocates of “live” practice often speak of the “emotional” or “psychological” aspect of violence and propose that their method prepares the trainee for that aspect by replicating it in the training hall. Studies of soldiers and first responders show that during a real “stress event” the heart rate goes through the ceiling, the mind fills with fear and fine motor skills are rendered inaccessible. The “live” fighter wants things to get as hairy as possible in the training hall in order to be familiar with the chemical cascade and emotional fog of violence so that he or she won't freak out when the real thing happens.

David Grossman, a military psychologist and author of “On Violence” disabuses the advocates of “live” training of their proposition. Simply put, nothing can prepare the individual for what happens during real live combat. There is no way to train for it in its hellish entirety.

Those who wish to train for “the octagon,” know in the backs of their minds that, no matter how brutal things get, they’re not fighting to the death. The referee will step in to prevent that. The cascade of chemicals that kicks in during real combat doesn’t get activated in the octagon. Reality is of a different chemical order than practically every other alternative. The military knows this. It’s one reason why it spends so much time and effort establishing unit cohesion in the recruits rather than subjecting them to virtual realities that, while persuasive, aren't convincing. When the shit hits the fan group cohesion is more likely to spare your life, not some hypothetical immunity to the effects of terror. As for those who say that Special Forces train in authentic simulations, well, that's as may be. But training for the Octagon or other No Holds Barred events while stressful are still a dollar short of combat reality.

The benefits of placing your system, physical and psychological, under acceptable amounts of stress should be clear. The trainee needs to experience the sense of being out of his or her depth to become acquainted with the signs of panic and learn simple steps to de-fuse it. Panic is the enemy. It is good to know the enemy and how the behaves prior to engagement. A good Traditional Martial Arts school, like Seido Karate, can provide these encounters with uncomfortable, even frightening, emotional states in an environment constructed to help the trainee navigate through those choppy waters and avoid physical and emotional shipwreck.

The dojo is a place where the trainee comes to express humanity in the service of change, not reinforce his or her natural barbarism and resistance to change. Facing one’s own capacity for egoism and smallness is still a challenge worth taking on. Gambatte kudasai! See you in the dojo.

Jet Trail over Yosemite 

Kizeme

This Japanese word, kizeme, means "spirit of attack." It is said of Miyamoto Musashi, the famed Japanese swordsman, that as he grew older he relied more on kizeme to defeat adversaries and, as a result, emerged victorious from challenges without taking the life of his opponent.

The willingness to attack is a potent weapon, made even more potent by prior demonstrations of effective technical skills. Clearly, Musashi's reputation preceeded him throughout Japan and this alone would be enough to intimidate even the best swordsman of the age. Yet it was not just "hype" that Musashi employed in his duels.

The strategy of Musashi's midlife, according to Kenji Tokitsu's recent biography of the famed swordsman, was that of incessant interdiction of his opponent's attack. Musashi placed enormous emphasis on intense training. Musashi himself claimed that it was through this lifelong boot camp approach to the practice of swordsmanship that he had developed the ability to perceive the will of his opponent even before it was made manifest in action. Intuiting his opponent's action before it even took shape, Musashi was able to take the initiative in battle and stifle his opponent's every move. It is this capacity for premonition, honed through years of training, that Musashi's biographer identifies as the "spirit of attack." To the modern trainee, it might just as well be called "defensive driving."

Call it what you will, this ability to anticipate with infallible accuracy the actions of another takes years of training to develop. Not years of training three times a week, an hour and a half each session; years of training hour upon hour a day, every day of the year.

What kizeme, the spirt of attack, truly represents is the capacity for undiluted commitment. Such commitment requires a certain immunity to irony. Irony, it has been written, is the view of a person looking backward from the present. Faith is the view of a person looking forward. Be that as it may, kizeme requires a whole-hearted approach and a willingness to commit oneself to taking action, i.e. attacking the problem. The modern trainee may not be able to match Musashi's long hours of daily practice, but the trainee can embrace his or her own capacity for commitment.

Action is the expression of the will and will is the divine spark that flows from choice. Choice allows the trainee to override prejudice and base instinct, the default settings of the organism, in favor, if it is so desired, of the greater good as the trainee understands it to be. It is the trainee's capacity to choose between two or more alternatives on the basis of prior experience rather than because of some default genetic wiring which elevates his or her choice to a spiritual level.

We are, as many a spiritual teacher has pointed out, the product of our voluntary choices. For every action there are consequences and it behooves the trainee to take this law into account when considering his or her actions. Once this is sorted out in the neo-cortex or reasoning part of the brain, the trainee commits without reservation from the older emotional and reflexive parts of the brain.

Kizeme is not a blind rush forward on the basis of wishful thinking. It is the product of years of dedication and an instant of inspiration alike. It is nurtured through commitment to commitment itself. Gambatte kudasai! See you in the dojo.