If there’s one thing the jonin (heads of ninja families) had in spades, it was the long view, the perspective that spanned more than just now or the next battle, but the next decade or two. The most successful jonin leaders made decisions that might have seemed counterintuitive or foolish in the short term but…
Have you ever had a glimpse of the greater you? Maybe you reacted in an emergency with greater speed, confidence, or strength than you thought possible. Maybe one day you were forced by a sense of needing to pause, only to be confronted with an amazing sunset or the perfect evening breeze. Maybe in a…
In the martial arts, the basics are everything. Refining the basics isn’t just a matter of doing them over and over again mindlessly, but looking at how to tweak and improve each basic technique. Last night at the Boston Martial Arts Center, I was learning from one of our master instructors about more basics using…
As part of the 2011 theme at the Boston Martial Arts Center, I was doing some digging around in my brain today about anger, especially after a learning experience this morning at the dojo. (a learning experience, as my college political science teacher once quipped, is what you get when you don’t get what you…
I see what you did there is one of my favorite expressions. I’m not sure where it came from or how it got into my vocabulary (I suspect Chris Brogan), but it encapsulates nearly everything I believe in as a student of marketing, martial arts, and life. You see, most of the lessons I’ve had…
We make reality in our world in three ways: thought, word, and action. It’s good to think about gratitude, to think about all we have that we might otherwise not. The grateful mind helps shape our view of the world and deepens our appreciation of everything that we have. It’s good to speak of gratitude,…
Every year at New England Warrior Camp, we have the opportunity to do tameshigiri, or live blade cutting. A bamboo mat is soaked in water, rolled up, and put on a pedestal. Martial practitioners then take a sharp sword and attempt to cut it in half. Learning how to perform a cut with a sword…
What’s the number one skill of the 21st century, the one thing that will make you incredibly successful? The will to focus. Focus itself is relatively easy. Turn off everything except the one task you need to be working on, and get it done. Power off your phone, shut off Twitter, etc. (unless of course…
I was reading bedtime stories the other night and came across a gem by Richard Scarry in the 365 Bedtime Stories compendium, which I think is incredibly illustrative of the way we dealt with bullies in the past and the way we deal with them now. In the short story The Rudiments, a boy is…
