ONLY OUT OF THE ‘WHAT’, CAN EMERGE THE ‘HOW’.

THINK LIKE A CHESS COMPUTER AND DEAL WITH THE JOB AT HAND.

Something that I think we are all a little bit guilty of is to think that there is more to dealing with violence than there is, we all do it, and I am not sure if there is any way to prevent this, so our best way forwards is to accept it and find a way to work around it.

A well proven method to improve anything is to reduce it to the simplest form that can still do the same work.

This is the Principal of Parsimony. {A.K.A. Occam’s Razor}.

The principle that the most acceptable explanation of an occurrence, phenomenon, or event is the simplest, involving the fewest entities, assumptions, or changes.

This is the philosophy of many Martial Art styles, but it is by no way the practice.

Even with Wing Chun, which has at its core the Principle of Simplicity, we spend many years learning how to deal with something that happens in a split second.

Can you relate to the tale below…

As a kid I was a decent Chess player, I represented my School and up until my early 30s I was an active member of a chess club. 

Like all chess enthusiasts I had dozens of books, I re-played famous games from past masters to try to improve my game, and like everyone else I thought that we must be able to see 5 or more moves ahead.

Then around 1983  I bought my first consumer level chess computer.

Even at its lower levels I lost.

I only began to win games once I began to play the way the computer played. And that was by treating every move as a seperate problem that only needed to solve that single situation.

I was still a chess club player and in what appeared to everyone else as overnight, I began to win a great deal more matches than I lost, along the way I took some notable scalps for my current standing, to be expected the much better players still beat me, but I went from “D” grade to “B” grade in 2 tournaments.

THINK LIKE A CHESS COMPUTER AND DEAL WITH THE JOB AT HAND.

From a personal prospective what is the problem we are trying to solve? 

What is the simplest way of solving it?

For instance….

From a “Fighting” perspective this is simply “how do I hit my opponent”?

As a Self-Defence problem it becomes “how do I stop my opponent hitting me”?

This approach allows for great personalisation instead of trying to make someone else’s IDEA work for us.

So how do we stop someone from hitting us?

The answers vary from run away, to hit them first, and all things in between.

But whichever answer we choose it will be our own answer.

Now we can direct our training into something we think is a good IDEA.

But how do we train that IDEA without getting swayed by our partisan bias?