Humans commonly overestimate knowledge rather than underestimate it. There are exceptions because I am always doing research that occasionally leaves me feeling I am way behind the curve in regard to martial arts, karate and especially self-defense.
In short I don't feel like I suffer from over estimating and over stating my knowledge of Self-Defense Karate.
I often wonder how humans survive and progress especially if the research is valid, I.e., we consistently overestimate knowledge. I am sure there is some natural way nature uses this to ensure survival - a simple complexity.
Maybe that is why I do what I do, question everything. It was said, “I think of myself as a translator whose job is to interpret and synthesize what I have read and learned - to put it in terms others can understand.” - Rolf Dobelli
It might better serve the martial arts/karate world to say instead, “I think of myself as a translator whose job is to interpret and synthesize what I have studied (read; observed; viewed as video’s, etc.; wrote, etc.), learned (academic + trng/practiced + experienced [hands-on], etc.), understood, and experienced - to put it in terms others can understand.”
In my personal case in my early years of practice and training I spent most of my time on the dojo floor because that is the way we did such things in those years. Not to say that still does not happen but as I grew older in karate and martial arts, as is natural, things changed, evolved and became different. I spent about half my time on the dojo floor and the other half studying, interpreting and honing of both physical and mental skills. In the last decade I spend about 20% of my time in personal training and practice and the other 70% in studies where I developed more of the philosophical and academic understanding as built on all my accumulated experiences both in the dojo and in life.
Now, I spend a lot of time researching, studying, analyzing, hypothesizing and then synthesizing things based on it all, although I don’t spend much time at all with other martial artists and karate-ka honing skills as a group through cooperation and communications, etc. I found in the last decade that my focus on JUST the DOJO FLOOR physical parts was NOT ENOUGH to fully understand and understand the full spectrum of such disciplines. It became a time I stopped giving lip service to things like the code of bushido, the philosophical as in relating the various influences of martial arts and karate through the ancient classics, etc.
Now, there are a lot of readers who will get to the end of that last paragraph and say, “What a conceited egoistic blow hard, he thinks he is better than us and has reached enlightenment!” Well, if you said that or something similar then, first, you are wrong in your assumptions. It isn’t about ego, superiority or enlightenment but rather a recognition that what I was doing was not enough - at least for me and my efforts to understand myself, my karate, self-defense and my beliefs and philosophies spanning all of it, i.e., home/family, work, social connections and martial arts/karate, etc.
I come back to what I first read from an article by Marc MacYoung when he said something like, “Knowing what you know, knowing you don’t know some times and knowing that there are things you don’t know you don’t know” (something like that anyway). I know there are things I don’t know and don’t know I don’t know (yet) so that is the focus here, to search out the many myriad things of life and the universe and come to recognize them, hopefully accept them and then try really, really hard to live right by all of it. At a stage I call my winter years I am just beginning to realize such things and am grateful I did so before my time ends. Now, what I do with that is something else altogether. That mountain is getting bigger and bigger and I barely got on the path up.
Now, the the crux of this effort, “When we say we are knowledgeable and experienced martial artists, where does that knowledge and experience originate?” In our minds, of course, but still, were we just born with this innate knowledge, understanding and skills? As I said, as we are born we have certain instinctual genetic switches that allow is to achieve certain things. There is no martial art or karate gene or genetic trigger. We are not born with such knowledge imbedded in a gene somewhere just waiting for some trigger to let it out.
In truth, everything we know, understand and experience comes from someone else or somewhere else or from some source to which we are exposed in our environment as to sensory input of sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. Someone else somewhere had to have this knowledge to pass on to you. Many tell of how much they know while others try to dissuade, deflect or simply say what you know and understand is not you or yours but someone else’s as if that weren’t true of everyone. Today’s masters all had to stand on the dojo floor with a white belt until enough stimuli is processed to build on and add to our memories, etc. I was not born a black belt.
Truly, to estimate the sources of your martial prowess and skills you have to first look to others who came before you (sound familiar). Even your master was a student who absorbed data from others so in truth no matter how long you train and practice your accumulated understanding and experiences are not yours but a process of data you acquired from someone else, from others materials and from other social influences of cooperative endeavor.
I consider myself a very knowledgeable karate-ka and martial artist and I readily admit that all of it regardless of its form, form in that it seems mine but not mine, is from other sources outside myself. Everything that I am and will be is from outside me and becomes mine by the input of stimuli and the ability of my brain and mind to synthesize into my belief system regarding karate and martial arts.
I was once told that nothing I put out on the blogs, etc., was my own and that I should attribute my writings to the sources to which I took it. I do that when it is a direct quote, mostly for I miss sometimes, because all the writings are my synthesis of all the others input be it personal or via other media like books, etc.
No knowledge is encoded into our genes and we don’t just suddenly become proficient and skilled in any discipline but through cooperation and social environmental influences we learn, process and change things to suit us as individuals according to cultural belief systems of family and society.
So, every single bit of my knowledge and understanding comes from diligent study of external sources and stimuli that my brain processes in its own way to construct the reality of my world be it at work, at home or on the dojo floor - even on the electronic screen in front of you where you and other read my stuff.
Can we truly estimate our personal martial knowledge? Yes, but it isn’t what you might think. About 10% of anyone’s skills come from the other 90% of processes and data found and fed to us from external sources. So the reality is that what we assume is ours isn’t and what we have is sourced from other than ourselves. It’s complex … It’s complicated …
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