The Magic You Are Looking For

As long-time readers of this blog may recall, every training session I have with my headmaster has been one of self discovery - not always good self discovery of course, but self discovery.  

I say "not good".  What I mean is "not good for my feelings", not "not good for correcting myself".  This time, the learning was around my willingness to do the work.

Do The Work is actually the title of a book by Steven Pressfield (he of Gates of Fire fame), the point of which is that in order to make progress, one has to push aside the resistance (The Lizard brain, he calls it) and start doing the things one needs to do to move forward.

And to be fair, that is part of what I was confronted with.  But the other thing, the deeper thing, is simply that I do not fully "do the work" I need to.

Perhaps because I did so well in school (I was, and am, a very good student as the whole "learn/study/test" thing works for my mind), I somehow picked up the belief that not only can I do anything (which is helpful) but that I can do it without necessarily having to invest the time and energy to fully master the thing - to "do the work".  Whether by bouts of intellect or a jovial nature, I have - in more cases than I tend to think - managed to "bend the rules" to do things.  Sometimes that looks a lot like having some but not all of the qualifications to do a thing (like, for example, my current line of work where effectively I have "grandfathered in" simply by the amount of time I have been in it).  Sometimes it is by knowing the outer shell of a thing but not the whole thing, yet projecting as if I do.  Sometimes it is being agreeable and personable and carefully avoiding having to display any actual knowledge.

This manifests itself in a lot of ways.  The most visible is simply making pronouncements based on what I can recall or believe to be true instead of following up to find out the facts.  Sometimes this is me doing things my own way and trying to fit it into the task that I have been asked. Sometimes, it is me simply using a very basic level of knowledge and trying to extrapolate to the more advanced concepts.  Sometimes, this is trying to rush through something I do not know well or fully in hopes that speed will carry me through to the parts I know well.

This all works, of course.  Until it does not.  And, as it turns out, the longer attempt to stay on a glide path instead of a flight path, the more obvious it becomes.

I want advancement in things - Iaijutsu of course in this context, but other things as well.  And I am guilty more times than I care to accept or think that I have attempted to find the easy way, the "magic way", to get it done.   Why?  Because "the work" is often boring.  It is repetitive.  It is time consuming. And progress often does not appear as the noticeable progress that fuels me:  there are no good grades.

Just the work.

But there is a magic to making all of this happen, of course.  It is, as the picture above notes, simply doing the work that I am avoiding.

The odd thing is that I know precisely - for every thing I am not making progress in - what that work is.  It means investing time - and by investing time, it means that I will end up doing less of some things because there is only so much time I have and can invest.

For years I believed there is "magic" to success.  There is; the question is whether I am willing to do the magic - which is everything that I have been avoiding to this point.