Developing your game

I remember something Guro Dan Inosanto said at one of his fantastic seminars I attended, where he was talking about techniques and having options. He said "You can have a 1000 songs on your iPod but only listen to one at a time".

The JKD mentality is one of efficiency, "do more with less" I've heard Guro Bob Breen say many times over the years.

With these things in mind I've recently been using a couple of analogies and examples about technique collecting versus learning via techniques. The first one will ring truer to those of us that still remember making our own mixtapes with 90min audio cassettes! We have a large music collection, maybe 100's of albums yet come back to the same few songs all the time, we go through 20 albums to make a playlist of 20 songs. We have experienced many to choose a few.

In much the same way you could be at buffet (sorry for those of you cutting weight or just starting that diet!). You pick up your empty plate, start to make your way through the buffet and try a small bit of everything on offer. Once you've tried it all, your second plate has less variety but more of the things you enjoyed the most.

With our training we try different things, train a range of different drills and techniques to meet different eventualities. Along the way you find things that really work for you and you keep coming back to them, this is how you get better.

It's very hard to pick everything up and get better at all of it together. You're shown different techniques in class where you try them out and drill them, pick the one you liked most and came easiest to you and practice that. Build on it, start looking for it in different situations and in sparring - it's a testing ground, you're safe, it's not a fight!

Soon you'll start to see your game improve, you've just added a tool, a weapon to your arsenal. Once you're comfortable, start concentrating on something new, something to support what you've just picked up! You had to listen to hundreds of songs to find the ones you keep coming back to and when you get bored of even your favourites, you seek out new ones or go back to give others another try. Now you start doing more with a few.

This is what Bruce Lee meant by absorbing what is useful and discarding what is useless. What is useful to one person at one time may not be to another, what's useless at one stage in your development may become useful later.

We don't go through techniques for the sake of it, there should be purpose to everything we do.

Lastly, I want to add that we are what we strive to be. Whatever it is you want in your life, keep working on it day by day, and you will have more of it in your life the more you strive for it. You will succeed a little bit each day and who doesn't want success?

See in you in class, Oss!