Relating Martial Arts to the Start-Up
Martial Arts and the Start-Up
This essay prepared for the UnConference, 12/17/21, sponsored by Silicon Valley Bank and FounderCulture.
SYNOPSIS
Martial arts often focus on an elusive concept characterized by the term 'center'. Students are introduced to this concept early in their training. In that context, instructors may emphasize various essential self-defense concepts such as, "Move the body as a unit, not as isolated parts." Over time, these vague concepts slowly crystalize into a series of realizations. When we examine our approach to our start-ups within the context of martial arts principles, we can see similarities emerging out of our own, unique 'everyday life dojos'.
For example, the martial arts practitioner learns not only about the center within him or herself, but about what constitutes the center of an attack. In that sense, we can cross-relate the notion that attacks and disruptions occur in many ways and through many circumstances. Our role, as we become everyday life martial art practitioners, is to learn to become that calm eye of the storm. Our mission as founders is to bring that sense of calmness into our work, whether our work is a startup, a product, a service or funding. That’s because the simplicity of that quiet calmness should be permeating our lives, our products and services, and the lives of our customers.
INTRODUCTION
I'd like to share several stories with you. Each story is unique in the sense that they convey situations where someone is either in or out of balance in the situation that they find themselves in. There are two points to this. First, are we honest with ourselves when we are teetering, when we are in a situation that threatens our balance? Secondly, do we have the tools to help us regain that sense of balance, to help us relax and not tense up? Because when we are the founders of companies and we are striving to grow them, our balance is often tested. As founders, we have a responsibility to not only recognize and hopefully improve our imbalances when they exist, but we also need to bring that same spirit to our teams, to our products and to our customers.
STORY 1: IN MY TWENTIES AND FLOUNDERING
One of the issues each of us deals with is stress. Stress takes many forms. For much of my life, the form it took in me was to say, "Nah, I'm fine." But I had my moments.
When I was 22 years old and living in Pittsburgh, I finally had my very first girlfriend. When she went back to visit her home in England for the summer, upon her return she fearfully confided in me that she thought she might have become pregnant during her trip. I encouraged her to wait and see if she resumed her cycle, which she did. Around the same time, she announced that she had thrown away my class ring. Don't get me wrong, she was a very sweet girl. But like many of us at various times in our lives, she was also struggling to find herself. Nevertheless, my high school ring was beautiful and a real treasure.
I had grown up poor, in a family that often had no food in the pantry and with parents who yelled so loud at each other at night that the entire neighborhood could hear it. We struggled to fall asleep. It was upsetting. When I finally went away to school, I had no financial support and at times I resorted to rescuing food out of dumpsters. So when my girlfriend also revealed that she had tossed that ring out of the window of a moving car, I was crushed. Because that class ring represented a rare moment of beauty in my life.
My stress took me to a dark place. I felt like an utter loser, completely worthless. All my friends had good jobs, were getting married and talking about having families. Having dropped out of college, I was a laundry boy at the local Holiday Inn. I had no car and boarded with three other guys in a house that we shared with three girls who lived downstairs. As I contemplated my lack of value, I started thinking about suicide.
I'm not sure I really intended to go there, but my imagination became very viv id. I wanted to suffer, so I rationalized a graphic and painful way to die. I wanted to punish myself for being so incompetent. I decided to die in agony by crucifying myself. I would be nailed to a cross, like Jesus, and everyone would show up on Sunday morning and find me and my cross, all bloody and dead, posted on the front lawn of the local Episcopal church. I never got far enough along to figure out how I would nail myself up there. Because soon after I had imagined my plan, I received a call that one of my younger sisters had been killed in a school bus accident and I left Pittsburgh.
My point is, life happens. And we can never quite predict how our circumstances are going to be interrupted. But when things like this happen, we can quickly become disoriented even though we are telling everyone else, "Nah, I'm fine." But that air of confidence isn't always real, and the imbalances that hide behind it can contaminate our lives in ways that we don't think anyone else can see or be affected by.
STORY 2: SOME BACKGROUND ABOUT JIU JITSU
I began studying Jiu Jitsu in 1990. Eventually I became an instructor. In 2012, I founded a monastery, largely as an outgrowth of my Jiu Jitsu studies. Along the way, I had discovered ways to apply the things that I was learning on the mat to my everyday life. But let's back up a bit.
By 1990, I was married, had two very young sons and was living in New York working as a senior project manager in the construction industry. I wanted a way to be able to defend my family, without resorting to owning a gun. And I had always been intrigued that martial arts sometimes promised to be some type of 'way of living'. What was that 'way', I wondered? It took many years of study to uncover that.
There are two basic forms of Jiu Jitsu. The most well known is Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ), popularized by the Gracie family. BJJ is essentially judo. The second form of Jiu Jitsu is the parent art, called Japanese Jiu Jitsu. That's my art.
Historically, Jiu Jitsu was the hand-to-hand combat art of the Japanese samurai who were regarded by many military historians as the fiercest warriors who ever lived. When the samurai no longer had his bow and arrow available, when even his sword had somehow been lost, then the only thing standing between him and certain death was himself, along with his hand-to-hand fighting abilities. That was Jiu Jitsu. It was a very secret, opaque, deeply protected art.
When Japan opened its' doors to the west in the late 1800s, the feudal class was disbanded. Jiu Jitsu was outlawed. Obviously, this upset the Jiu Jitsu teachers who, along with the samurai, were all instantly unemployed. Some of them went underground, while a few others were determined to find ways to somehow preserve the art.
One Jiu Jitsu master, Jigoro Kano, decided to take the throws and grappling aspects out of Jiu Jitsu and teach it under the guise of calling it a sport. That movement became Judo. Another Jiu Jitsu master, Morihei Ueshiba, decided to take the art of capturing an opponent’s energy and submitting them by using fulcrum and non-fulcrum throws. He called that Aikido, and promoted it as a spiritual study.
STORY 3: MARTIAL ARTS PRINCIPLES
Ueshiba, was a very small man. He stood at 5'1". Even when he was in his 80s, he was able to defeat multiple attacks by far larger and trained men. What was he doing that allowed this to occur? He was using principles.
Ueshiba's top student was a man named, Koichi Tohei, who was Aikido's heir apparent. Tohei had the gift of being able to breakdown and explain what Ueshiba was doing, in ways that Ueshiba himself couldn't always easily articulate. He called these hidden explanations principles.
Tohei eventually formed his own branch of Aikido called The Ki Society. One of the principles that he taught was called the Principle of Ki or Energy. Ki, he stated, consisted of four components or sub-principles. They were:
Relax
Keep Weight Underside
Maintain One Point
Extend Ki (or chi or energy)
He taught that if you were doing any one of these four principles, you were doing all four. I rather liked that because it conveyed the notion that we are really getting down to business when we can incorporate that level of efficiency. In other words, if you are doing any one of these, you are doing all four.
So, for me personally, these were the kinds of things that absolutely captured my attention, ideals to which I have ended up devoting over 30 years of my life. Along the way, I had been studying and practicing how to bring these somewhat esoteric principles into my everyday life. Not in a tough-guy, show-boaty way, but rather in ways that are practical and effective in virtually any situation including relationships, business dealings, startups, meetings and customer issues.
There’s an ease that comes with relaxing
One of the great benefits of martial arts is that you can reveal in physical form things that are hard to see and truly understand when they remain strictly intellectual concepts. It's the whole notion of a holographic universe, wherein things in the mind don't necessarily remain hidden in the mind. They manifest in the emotions or in our bodies. And vice versa. Things in our emotions can manifest in our minds, as did my desire to be nailed to a cross. It had been my emotions that had driven my mind to come up with that dark scheme, and to then want to physically act it out.
Among the principles I zeroed in on is the one called 'Relax', because Tohei's Principles of Ki were taught in our Jiu Jitsu curriculum. Besides, who couldn't benefit from being more relaxed in life? Yet, we often wear tension and stress as some kind of battle trophy, as if living inside of stress is somehow giving us a hard-core advantage, a combative edge.
STORY 4: THE BUDDHIST WHO 'GETS IT' IN AN INSTANT
I have a friend who lives in Asia. She is a devout practitioner of Buddhism. She was intrigued by my advocation of principles and started asking questions. Every time I would provide her with a short description she would cut me off by saying, "Ok, I got it. So? What's next?"
Her so-called 'instant comprehension' was an enormous barrier. I simply couldn't get past her commitment to "So?" We parted amicably because I feared that pushing this point would threaten our friendship.
Deeper principles have been the foundation of the martial arts for centuries. And similar to deeper Zen, Taoist, Stoicism or philosophical truths, they are Sustainable. This is true no matter which generation to which you belong. Universal truths or principles are among humanity's most meaningful and sustainable heritages. But they are not well popularized. Mostly because they are hard to explain without years of training. Yet, intellectually they seem quickly comprehensible.
In that regard, Tohei's book, Ki in Daily Life, made far better sense to me within the context of my Jiu Jitsu studies rather than in simply reading about it. It is full of illustrations of Aikido techniques, each meant to drive home more meaningful realizations of the principles than mere reading could convey. And so it went with me... I learned by doing. I learned by seeing speed-bumps and glitches in my techniques on the mat. I then began to see them in my everyday life, as well. I was deeply interested in these cross-relationships. On the mat, to reveal my deficiencies, I'd slow down my technique. Similarly, in everyday life I began taking a more 'practiced', slower, more nuanced approach. Slowing things down in everyday life tended to similarly expose my 'glitches'.
One day my sensei pulled me aside before class and told me that he wanted me to do nothing but practice falling. I rotated through the various students that evening, partnering as one student after another would take me down. This went on for the entire class. And the next class. And the next week. For about three months, actually. Yet by the end, I was not only far better at taking falls, I was also far better prepared for the inevitable falls that life brings us.
STORY 5: MOVING FAST OFTEN HIDES THINGS
My sensei would say, "Many times when a student is doing their technique too fast, it's because they are hiding its defects."
Why subscribe to Aesop's "Slow and steady wins the race?"
Speed often covers things up. As an instructor, it is clear to me where a student has hang-ups, regardless of how fast they are performing their technique. I can see it. I don't ask them to slow things down for my benefit... it's for them to be able to see the thing they haven't been able to see up until now.
So as students slow down, they started to relax. And as the student relaxes, his or her partner may also relax. Often, the entire class relaxes. And in a class situation, it frequently becomes easier to acknowledge our own tendencies to cover things up when we see our classmates going through the very same thing. As a leader, we have opportunities to offer similar examples by being more transparent in our own approaches to problems.
Here's what we don't want to do: rush things when to rush places us or others into stress and creates out of balance conditions.
I want that relaxed state existing within my team. As a CEO, I also want to have similar qualities in my company, in our relationships, in our product and in our customer's experience. We have a small saying on our website. It is kind of hidden, but nonetheless important to us.
We're not the team who showboats or brags about trophies and awards. We'd rather quietly go about building something incredible. We're patient, we'd rather take our time... and then hand you a rock-solid, practical tool that makes your experience in buildings get better and better.
Sensei Tohei framed it similarly:
"Why do people feel that it is impossible to relax when something big is happening? First of all, this notion arises from the illusion that when one is relaxed he is weak. The fact is that if you relax properly you are very strong. Secondly, people do not know how to relax and feel that they cannot."
STORY 6: MOVING TENSION TO A DIFFERENT PLACE. SAME TENSION, JUST MOVED
Sometimes, when we try to relax, we relax one area of tension by moving it to another area of tension. This is not relaxing. Sometimes when we try to 'relax' our customers, we try to do that by talking incessantly, as if getting enough words out of our mouth and into their ears will somehow relax us, and them. But these efforts miss the point.
There is an essay on the monastery called My Spring-Loaded Shoulders of Anxiety. When I first started training, my sensei would say, “Drop those shoulders.”
He’d say it repeatedly to me and to other students. I had to push them down. Because if I didn’t force them down they’d immediately wind back up. I was spring loaded. Looking back, I realized that I had been that way for years. I worked on it for a long time until one day, with a new sensei, I happened to mention how I had finally pulled it off.
"I moved it," I told him.
"What do you mean 'you moved it'" he asked?
"I moved it down here", I replied, pointing to my lower abdomen. I was kind of proud of dropping those shoulders. But he wasn't. He was aghast.
"You don't MOVE it!" he exclaimed. "You should be trying to relieve it, to calm it. But even worse, you moved it down into hara!"
'Hara' is a martial arts term to describe our center. Hara is located two or three inches below the navel and in the center of the body. It's a bit higher in women. My first sensei used to say, "Imagine that you are down there, like in a submarine. And you are looking out of a periscope, which are your eyes. From down there."
I've never quite figured that one out.
But clearly, I had not accomplished anything by moving my stress and tension somewhere else. Instead of relaxing, I had transferred it. It didn't take long for me to see the obvious connection of transferring my stress into family members or business meetings or even important personal goals. And just because no one could see it didn't diminish that this was what was happening. I also started to see that other people were doing the same kinds of things.
When we relax, we are becoming calm. Imagine the eye of a hurricane. I've been in the eye several times in my life. It is calm. It is still and the sky is blue with the sun shining. It's a bit breathtaking. The martial artist learns how to reach that place within themselves. Because when we are living in that calmness, living within the eye of that storm, it only takes the smallest of efforts to create the greatest of effects. If the eye of the hurricane merely blinks, the storm's power rages 200 miles away.
STORY 7: THE MACHETE DEMONSTRATION
One day, I was wondering what would happen if all the steel in high-rise buildings just quit, or got tired one day. I’ve always taken those girders for granted. But the thing is, on a molecular level they are moving. Which may not be a particularly comforting thought. Especially pertaining to buildings. I mean, energetically speaking, that steel is alive.
Well, through martial arts experiences I got some insight into steel. I felt it vibrating during a martial arts demo.
In 1989, before I joined Jiu Jitsu, I was invited to something called The Machete Demonstration. I had no idea what that meant. I arrived in a community center and took a seat with about a hundred other people. The room was a bit noisy until someone asked us to all stop talking, that the demonstration was about to begin.
A group of five men walked out, each dressed in martial arts gi's (uniforms). They were all black belts. One of them was clearly the leader and was introduced. Another of the men was holding a machete.
The Jiu Jitsu master untied his top and dropped it to the floor. Two of the men stood on each side of him, facing his shoulders. One man stood behind him. The other two men put all four hands on the machete. The master had them close in and he carefully position the point on his stomach. He then began deep breathing. The two men standing to his side each put two hands on his upper arms. His breathing intensified and the guys holding the machete carefully positioned themselves. With a ferocious roar the master stepped into the blade as the two men thrust it toward him. There was a horrifying pause before the blade suddenly bent. The master stepped back, took the machete from his assistant's hands and turned toward the crowd. None of us had a clue what to say or how to react.
I later learned that the two men holding his arms were there to catch him when he had finished. The master later explained that sometimes his legs gave out. The guy behind him was there as a backup, for the same reason.
I had watched carefully for any sign of trickery. It looked real. He had not placed the tip of the blade on his sternum or a rib, which I had half-expected. He had placed it on soft tissue. You could see the mark that the tip had made on is skin, but nothing was cut and there was no blood.
My brother was his student and eventually became head instructor and a master himself. Some years later he opened his own school. One day he spontaneously announced that he was going to do The Machete Demonstration. Right now. "But I am going to use a Brazilian machete, not one from the Army/Navy store. They bend too easy."
Counting him, we were a four-man team. In our case, we put six hands on the blade's handle. With no apparent preparation, he took his shirt off. He then instructed us. "Don't let the blade twist. On my signal, as I step in your job is to move the blade toward my spine. Don't hesitate. Relax. Stay calm."
He stepped in. We pushed. The blade bent.
We did this many times over the years. Eventually the six hands became four and finally two: mine.
One time we used spring steel. It bent, but as my brother stepped back the blade quickly 're-sprung' into its original shape. As it did, It traveled up his chest toward his throat and chin. He turned his head to the right out of instinct. The blade left a long scorch mark from his abdomen all the way up to the side of his neck.
I asked him one time, in front of a crowd, to explain why he did this. "Because I want to show people that the principles I teach are truly powerful. That I’m willing to put my life on the line."
One of the last times we did it, I could literally feel our combined energy in the handle of the machete. The handle was buzzing. The steel was notably ‘alive’.
A few years later I told my brother that I would never again do The Machete Demonstration. "It's too dangerous."
He tried to laugh me off but I said, "No. That's it. I'm not prepared to lose you."
EFFORT
One thing that I have deeply realized over years of studies is to minimize my effort.
For example, if you want to build a product that is simple to use, you need to minimize your design. Perhaps that means creating tightly compact, stand-alone software modules. Which in turn should ultimately translate into your user having an easier and easier experience.
One of the problems with fast-tracking our lives and our work is that the joyful experience we are wanting to give our team and users can become consumed in all fast-pacing, rushed design and confused iterations. Where is the calmness that we hope to infuse and experience in everything we touch?
As a Jiu Jitsu practitioner, when someone attacks me I can step back, out of range. Or I can step in. In either case, we become trained to keep ourselves calm. Calm in body, emotions, mind and spirit. We become that calm eye in the center of the attack. And because we can maintain this, we need very little effort to affect what can be massive changes to our attacker, to our problem, to our relationships, or to the things we are wanting or needing to solve. So when the storm of is upon me, when the attack is marching relentlessly forward, I want to stay calm and relaxed. This is what I strive for throughout my life.
And even in our startups, if we want to create massive change then we need to be able to go to the place within ourselves that can create the greatest amount of change with the least amount of effort. That's both efficient and sustainable.
INTEGRATION
Martial arts can (but not necessarily) lead its advanced practitioners to deeper awareness regarding the so-called oneness of things. As the artist studies he/she can achieve insights into consciousness and the unity of relationships. This viewpoint is reflected in the saying, ‘as above, so below’ and ‘as below, so above’.
In this regard, the more separately we approach work versus life, or team versus product, or startup versus end user… the less relaxed and more divisive our efforts.
The idea is to relax, to be unified.
I'd like to give you a small demonstration of “moving the body as a unit, not as isolated parts’.
DEMO
WHERE DOES IT GO?
There is a story told about a magic pot. It seemed that anything you threw or placed into the pot simply disappeared. It completely vanished. As Tohei recounted this story he went on to say:
"We all have such a magic pot in the one point in the lower abdomen. This is an infinitely small point which can engulf everything. For example, even if someone spreads false rumors about you, you need not lose your temper. By throwing your anger away into your one point, you need not do something heatedly that you would later regret. Nor need you repress it, which only means the anger will come out later. As one tries to improve his one point in daily life, one should be able to maintain a perpetually relaxed state of mind and body. He will develop a mind which is immovable even though the world around him collapses, and a mind which is as vast as the ocean which can engulf everything and remain unpolluted."
The Catholic mystic, Thomas Merton, talked about the very same thing:
“At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our mind or the brutalities of our own will.”
“This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak His name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our sonship. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven.”
“It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billion points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely…I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.”
We often hear about work/life balance. We are repeatedly encouraged to find the thing, perhaps separate from work, the brings us joy or passion. We often call these things hobbies, sports or the arts.
We can examine the lives of some of the martial arts masters to get their own work/life insights into balance or harmony. Many of them, as they aged, became far more interested in the spiritual aspect of their studies than the physical techniques. Because over time they began to realize a deeper understanding of the foundational aspects of living. This brought them into realizations that there is no separation between, say, work and life. Because with separation we have division. In my opinion, we should be striving for unity not division.
CONCLUSION
The main ideas being discussed here are about applying principles, and perhaps also about studying them in ways that we've not previously considered. If we examine things more deeply, we can discover that various martial artists convey that their years of study have led them to a deep realization of relaxing. Because they have each discovered a point within themselves that also behaves like an inner truth barometer, because the last person you want to bullshit is yourself. It’s that “one point in the abdomen” and that “point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion”.
Each of these seven (7) stories gives us glimpses into principles that we can use in our startups. Applying these principles begin within ourselves, in exactly the same way is if we are stepping onto a dojo mat. But we can also extend them to our teams, into our design and with our customers and investors.
We've also glimpsed a brief insight into Jiu Jitsu, which means ‘the supple art’. By supple we mean 'not hard and rigid' on one end of the scale, and 'not limp or spongy' on the other end of the scale. Suppleness resides in between. It lives in between being tense or bossy and being a mush or a pushover. It's the supple, practical applications of universal principles.
Additional Reading: The Philosophy of Simplicity
ABOUT
Mark Walter began his martial arts journey in 1990, and became an instructor in Jiu Jitsu. In 2012, he founded the Little Creek Monastery. The monastery is 100% virtual and is open to anyone, regardless of belief. There are no membership fees or dues. The 600+ monastery members are an eclectic blend of Taoists, Zen, Buddhists, Protestant, Catholic, Muslims, Jewish, Native American, Dudeists, philosophers, agnostics and atheists. The monastery houses numerous essays on consciousness, class warfare, social fairness, applying martial arts principles in everyday life, and includes such topics as 'Work, Business and the Martial Arts' and 'Practical Practices of the Nothingness Mind'.