Taking It Back and Bringing It Forward

There are times when results just do not reflect the effort being put into an endeavour. Progression paralysis can hit at anytime. It can be frustrating when you are doing everything you can physically do to improve yet your outcome does not meet your expectations. Sometimes we forget that knowledge is not the same as skill. Sometimes what we are doing is not the problem. Sometimes the problem is how we are thinking.

In kung fu, much of what I teach today is knowledge I have had for decades but did  not have the experience to fully understand it enough to be able to pass it on to my students. I have learned that knowledge plus wisdom equals skill. Book smart is more knowledge, street smart is more skill.

Experience you acquire gives you the opportunity to turn the lessons of yesterday into the new lessons of today. If you only take your new experiences and only apply them moving forward, you are missing out on so much knowledge that could benefit from your newfound wisdom.

After every class I teach, I remind my senior students that they have just acquired enough knowledge in the last hour to keep them busy for the next decade IF they take their new insights and apply them to all their old lessons and bring them forward with with this new perspective. Old knowledge is new again.

“Learning how to learn is life’s most important skill.” - Tony Buzan (b. 1942)