There are three kinds of people. Those who think. Those who don't think. And those who think they think.
That saying can be modified to: There are three kinds of people. Those who do. Those who don't do. And those who think they do.
And unfortunately, that last group is made up largely by people who mistake training for doing.
The reason that the people who regularly stake their lives on their training are more open minded is
1) They know every decision must be worth your life (including the
decision to have an open mind).
2) They've experienced enough live-fire danger to know that 'doing' is
a whole lot more complicated than they were told in school.
3) They know unknown unknowns can kill them. So they are
always on the look out to turn unknown unknows into known unknowns -- or better yet, knowns.
On the other hand, people who don't have to worry about what-they-don't- know-killing-them are not only under less pressure to think, but are more prone to believe what they know is 'the whole of the subject.' This delusion passes for their reality. They not only lack anything to prove them wrong, but this intellectual fantasy is all that they can see. Worse, they often believe that what they know about a particular subject extends out into knowing about other subjects too.
People who understand they are staking their lives on their training
tend to be more open minded about training. Whereas the most
closed-minded and dogmatic are those who are safely ensconced
far away from doing.
Just going through some of your older posts. And this is a fantastic one! I know of too many people who think this way and are very dogmatic about their martial art/training methods. I am "open-minded" enough to say that I have fallen into this too while training in a particular system until I started seeing the holes and doing more research; but we've talked about this before :-) Keep up the good work, talk soon
ReplyDeleteI cannot take the credit for this one. This is Marc's... and he is totally right. Glad to see you figured it out by yourself. Smart people not hindered by their ego usually do.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the nice comment ;-)