The Finger That Points at the Moon

Thanks to Bryan for inspiring this post.

So you decided to do something completely new, and you made the decision to do it right! You crossed your t’s and dotted your lower-case j’s. You fulfilled due diligence, did  your internet research and got the best instructor and purchased top-dollar, top-quality equipment. Thanks to your winning strategy, the next few months of your life are going to be a dizzying spiral upwards into the stratosphere, marked by continual, measurable improvements in skill, right? Right?

Well, not necessarily.

Instructors are guides. We facilitate learning (and hopefully eventual mastery) of a subject by guiding you along a path invariably lined with pitfalls, dead-ends, false finishes, and false prophets. You see, we’ve fallen in those pits, followed those dead-end paths and false prophets, and arrogantly cried out “I’m finally finished” only to find out how humiliatingly wrong we were. We’ve done it all so you don’t have to. As instructors, we genuinely want you to be better than we are, and we’re there for you, to show you what to do and how to do it. After all, as we learned from the G.I. Joe cartoon, knowing is half the battle. However, the other part is far more important, and that is the doing.

Knowing at an intellectual, conceptual level what to do and what not to do, knowing the movements, the equipment and the vocabulary, all of that is well and good, but it is not the same as that knowledge being a part of who you are, as merely having that knowledge is not the same as experiencing its truth. The finger that points to the moon, as the old saying goes, is not the moon, and the map of the territory should not be confused with the territory itself. All of the accumulated knowledge from the classes we take and the research we do, it is merely the map to where we are going, and it is worthless if we do not use it to get there.

That requires work.

We instructors cannot perform that vital part of learning for our students. It is up to them to do the same move tens, hundreds, or thousands of times to make it second nature. It is up to them to find within themselves the hunger for improvement, the vision to see their potential, and the strength and determination to actualize it. Learning properly is a hard task, it’s not always fun (for an excellent treatment of this subject, see the amazing book “Talent is Overrated“) and it is up to each individual student to find their own motivation and dedication they’re willing to put forth to improve.

There is an old saw about writing that says that the author should open up a vein and bleed on the page. I think that is true about teaching as well. In order to be a successful instructor, we must convey our passion and love for the subject we’re teaching. In return, the most successful students must display that passion and love as well, and we instructors appreciate most those who unabashedly display that love openly. Detachment and cynicism have no place in the classroom, the gym, or the kwoon, in either student or instructor.

In the long run, we get out of anything exactly what we put into it. In martial arts, Crossfit, or anything, there are varying levels of skill, physical ability, sophistication, dedication, enthusiasm, drive involved for everybody. We have to expect a Gaussian distribution for each of those attributes for each student we teach. We instructors cannot control any of those things. All we can control is our own output, our manifestation of our enthusiasm for our art.

We instructors want nothing more than for the students to succeed, but the bulk of the battle is up to the individual student. I love nothing more than to teach a student who has boundless enthusiasm for learning, who constantly bugs me for details on this or that, or my view on how to get better. It’s running into these firebreathers that rewards an instructor the most. At the same time though, we have to be respectful of the people who may not desire perfection in this one particular thing that we do. Perhaps they have other true passions, about which they are the master and we are the neophyte. A different level of dedication on their part doesn’t make them bad, lazy, untalented; it makes them differently motivated, and we have to accommodate and respect that.

We absolutely cannot judge anyone for a perceived lack of effort, even if we know that they are capable of more than they are displaying. Instead, we have to look at it at worst as a problem to be solved. Part of our jobs as instructors is to help our students realize and actualize their potential. We cannot do that from a mental and emotional place of negativity.

When the student is ready, the teacher will appear, but we teachers also have to be ready.