I got a lot of comments from different sources regarding my post Throw Out Your Goals.  There were a few misconceptions that I want to cover.  First let me list some of them:

• Goals are important to accomplish what we want
• Brad Pitt has good genes and is lucky
• Success is defined differently for different people
• Just because you love something doesn’t mean you’ll be good at it
• Not every one can do what they love and get paid for it

There were plenty more.

Let’s start with defining success.  My first post never defined success.  It defined certain people’s level of success but never went as far as gave it a definition.  In this post, I will remain ambiguous on the definition of success.  Because who ever commented and said success is different for different people is correct.  I know a man who thinks he’s successful because he’s raised healthy, intelligent children.  I know fighters who’ve beaten great opponents who believe their own performances were below par.  Hell…Donald Trump hates being a multi-millionaire, and only considers himself a success when he has multi-billions.

Success is much like a goal.  Once you reach it, your work, the process to attain it, doesn’t stop.  If a fighter won her first fight, she doesn’t stop training.  She continues to train for the next fight.  If she’s won the world belt in her weight class, then she still has to continue to sharpen her skills for her first title defense.  What happens when she defends it successfully?  Celebrates?  For sure!  Beware.  There are others who are hungry for her belt.  Back to the process.  What if she loses?  Back to the process.

I love this one.  Brad Pitt has good genes and is lucky.  I’m not denying his good genes and looks.  What I do deny is his luck.  To say he was lucky is to deny the hard work he’d committed, wearing a chicken suit, working odd jobs, before he got his first major role.  Look at Steve Carrell.  He was an unknown comic for twenty years until luck struck him.  Luck?  No.  Hard work and perseverance?  Most definitely.  

And good looks was never a prerequisite for success in Hollywood.  With over a million good looking people in Los Angeles, it doesn’t explain Jack Black.  Now, some find him hot.  But he’s doesn’t fit the traditional leading man look.

This next one is good.  You can’t make a living doing what you love is a lot of people’s excuse to settle for mundane jobs.  I’m not saying quit your day job, lose your house, die of starvation.  Keep your day job, but work on what you love during your free time.  John Grisham is a great example.  He was a lawyer for ten years before he wrote his first novel.  He got to the office two hours before he started his real job, wrote, then started on his case list.  The awesome thing is he published his first book.

If you don’t think you can make a living doing what you love, then you won’t.  Simple as that.

Think you’d suck being a parent?   You will.

Believe you can run a marathon?  Follow up with action, and you will.

Whether you think you can or can’t, you’re right.  Henry Ford said that.  He wanted to create a V-8 engine.  He surrounded himself with brilliant engineers. You know what they said?  Can’t be done.  Ford pushed them forward, told them it was possible.  Through several failures, it was done.  Look it up.  True story.

The last one I want to tackle is:  just because you love it doesn’t mean you can be good at it.  Crap.  In Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers:  The Story of Success, he talks about mastery of skill.  He’d found one commonality among all world class musicians, artists, athletes, etc.  What is it?  Ten thousand hours of practice.  You want to be a world class anything?  Here it is, ten thousand hours of work.  That’s why you gotta love the process, not the goal.  Love the process, the goal will come many times over.

In most martial arts schools, the punch is the staple of the strikes.  Whether you’re in MMA, karate, kung fu, and even tai kwan do, punches seem to lead the strikes as the favored weapon.

But there’s a problem.

If you’ve ever looked at an x-ray of a hand balled into a fist, it looks like a bag of bones.  Literally.  What happens when you throw that bag of bones into something hard like a skull?  Bones break, splinter, shatter.  Professional fighters like those seen in the UFC have hands broken all the time.  And they’re skilled fighters who not only practice the correct way to punch from different angles and situations, but they do this an average of six hours a day, five days a week.

Now, the traditional martial arts instructor is asking a person off the street, who practices maybe an hour a day, to strike with a bag of bones.  Common!

I’d talked to a true kung fu master, who practiced iron body training, used to specialize in breaking skulls with a single punch.  He said something really interesting.  He was instructing a student who was about five feet tall.  He told her that her striking range was inside her attacker’s striking range.  No four foot person is going to attack her.  The master taught to use slaps to work your way inside, then use elbows, knees, gouges, etc.

Slaps.

There was a scene in Tombstone where Kurt Russel’s character, Wyatt Earp, confronted a card dealer who made trouble for the saloon.  As the card dealer was threatening to do something, Kurt–we’re on a first name basis–slapped him.  It was one of the coolest scenes in a western.  Kurt slapped him again and again.

Slaps align the bones in your hand.  Because of this, breakage is unlikely.  And if you think a slap doesn’t hurt or is sissy, ask anyone to slap you hard and tell me if it just tickles.  Accuracy is still required, but not as much as a punch.  You want to be effective with a punch, you gotta be totally accurate.

Slaps also take little skill.  You can slap someone with bad form, and it’d still hurt.  Punch someone with bad form, and all you’ve done is push them.  Another strike that takes little skill.

In my book, my character have claws.  So I had to find creative and interesting ways of striking and fighting because the punch was taken out of the equation.  Ask any woman who has long nails make a fist and punch.

Chun Li.  Kristin Kreuk.  My Asian sistah!  It’s cool that they made a martial arts movie around a female character.  It gives little girls someone to look up to.  I’ve mentored children, and they all need heroes to admire and model.

But the problem with these movies, movies based on video games, is that they don’t honor the game.  I remember the Street Fighter era.  The worn down ball joystick, the shiny red buttons, and the “Kamehameha” brings memories of getting my butt kicked.  I was never good at it, but when I watched others play, it was like a freakin ballet dance of kicking ass.

And Chun Li kicked ass.  And they tried to keep her powers true to the video game.  But not enough.  Not enough to bring the spirit of the game to the screen.  Directors and screenwriters know the issue.  It was the biggest complaint of the first Street Fighter movie with Jean Claude Van Damme.  Damn it!

But I watched it for Kristin.  I’m a sucker for hazel eyes.