Versatile Martial Artist

 

On being "Jack of all trades, master of none"

I have always been ashamed of admitting that I am, for the most part, a "Jack-of-all-trades-guy". Because it does not have a professional sound to it. But I guess I have always been looking for ways to make people (myself included) learn faster or gain an advantage over opponents.

Little did I know the whole quote from Shakespeare:

"A jack of all trades is a master of none but oftentimes better than a master of none".

This is not to say that I think I'm better than anyone else but it does not mean that I'm not worse either. But that whole quote made me think about why I train (and guide) myself and others to test not only one style of doing things but to search for things outside the norm. That being said, if you are in a hurry to learn martial arts (as an example) you might not have the time to journey through all possible martial arts. So you just pick one and hope it is good enough.

RBSD beginnings

When I started the martial arts in the 90's I ordered the Black Belt magazine for a quite a few years, searching for the holy grail of martial arts. I came across a column from Jim Wagner and despite the criticism on the guy (at least on the internet forums, the mecca of all knowlegde) he did open many eyes on reality based training, mine too. He probably was not the first but he did quite a big job to make RBSD known to the world.

On one article he recommended training one style of fighting for six months before moving to another. I don't remember all of them but it included boxing, bjj and krav maga. 

So I guess that did direct me to this path as well. There have been times that I wished I had continued on at least one of the arts to gain a black belt (so my motivation was flawed to begin with). Now I understand that I'm not supposed to rush things... and that I am probably not ready, yet.

The result

But what doing different arts has accomplished is that it has given a quite wide look on things. There is so much to learn if you give yourself a chance to explore the wide variety of things.

Versatile martial artist

Which is actually the point where I was going with all this. I bring a variety of things to our training sessions but keep the same subject (grappling, punching, clinching, blade work, self defence etc.) for some time to drive in the principles of a certain way of fighting. Not to make you a specific kind of fighter but to give you an idea that you can bring to your own style or art (people that train with me have their own main thing) that I try to supplement to make them better. I realized this after the Jim Armstrongs Barebones seminar weekend. 

(On a side quote, Jim's seminars and teaching are highly recommended. The weekend has made me think about my BJJ practice a lot and it has started to change the way I am doing it.)

In conclusion...

So I guess I have accepted that I really am a jack-of-all-trades and that might be a good thing. And it is this philosophy that I want to share with fellow martial artists.

Have fun and beware the gospel of "this is the only way to..." whatever you are embarking upon.

”Professional”.

 

Professional 

I’ve been thinking about this lately. I recently got out from active field work. Now I’m no English teacher as you can probably see from my previous texts… but I have thought a lot about the word ”professional”. According to Oxford dictionary, professional means (adjective)

1. relating to or belonging to a profession.
   
2. engaged in a specified activity as one's main paid occupation rather than as a pastime.
   

or (noun)

3. a person engaged or qualified in a profession.
4. a person engaged in a specified activity, especially a sport, as a main paid occupation rather than as a pastime.
   

This really is not important per se. Everyone does things at their own level, be it ”professional” or a hobby. But things might not be so black and white as they seem. A little background story.

When I was working in my former team we had a chance to attend our … let’s call it ”sister” organizations exercise. These people could only be called professional in category 3, since they are were not paid or do their stuff as their ”main occupation rather than as a pastime”. Now before anyone thinks I am about to start bad mouthing them because they are not professionals… it was quite the contrary. They did their basics so out of routine that I actually shamed us instead. They were taking things way more serious than we did. And they did a very nice job. They had the enthusiasm and motivation in order. Doing things at a lower level but doing it better. 

So how is this even possible? Does this mean that we were amateurs? After all, we were the ones who were getting paid and they were not.

I don’t mean that the definitions are wrong. But it does get tricky if you only watch the ”getting paid” -part. 

I would say that in sports world the definitions are more clear: if you are not good you won’t get paid doing it (or your competitors just really suck which I doubt rarely happens). But in working environment it’s not so clear cut.

Then what about ”done it for real”? Even that does not solve anything since you could have done things in real life without ever been a professional. 

I am just questioning the status of both the professional and amateur. A professional might be there just for getting paid and an amateur might be in to that stuff and be superior to that professional.