In the book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, the author summarized the conclusion of an article “The Mundanity of Excellence” which examines the excellent performance of competitive swimmers as “….the most dazzling human achievements are, in fact, the aggregate of countless individual elements, each of which is, in a sense, ordinary.“

In the next paragraph the author continued :-

Dan Chambliss, the sociologist who completed the study, observed: “Superlative performance is really a confluence of dozens of small skills or activities, each one learned or stumbled upon, which have been carefully drilled into habit and then are fitted together in a synthesized whole. There is nothing extraordinary or superhuman in any one of those actions; only the fact that they are done consistently and correctly, and all together, produce excellence.”

The above basically tells us that if we strive to be excellent in our choice of martial arts study we need to break down the learning and practice the hell out of each segment.

However, don’t just blindly practice. As pointed out by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who wrote the classic “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience” it is deliberate practice that we desire, not just 10,000 hours of blind practice.

For example, if you desire to be soft in your practice you can’t just will yourself to be soft. More often than not, such wishful thinking leaves one with limpy and floppy arms that collapse under strong pressure.

Reading about how soft should be conceptually is useful, but only just a tiny bit. Instead, what we need is the method.

Yes, there are methods (with varying results) that can help us to attain our goal. The method starts us on our journey and the landmarks indicate if we are on the right path. The baseline references tells us if we have reached our destination.

Every little bit moves us along the path to mastery. The sum of the parts defines our level of skill. So the clearer and more defined your learning is, the higher the chances of you getting it.

For example, it is not useful to just train to be soft. We need to ask why be soft, what is its usefulness, what are the characteristics of functional softness, how do we train it, how do we benchmark our training attainment, how do we know when we have reached the baseline (which begs the question what is the baseline), how do we apply it, how do we refine the softness gained, and so on.

When you treat the study this way sans the style, lineage, personalities, politics, verbiage that typically infests a gathering of humans, you filter out the factors that cloud and confuse the learning.

If you can infuse the learning with science it will give you an independent source to verify against. You may be surprised to know that for all the claims of being scientific, effective, etc many practices are in fact not that scientific nor effective when held up against the light of published knowledge relating to the human body.