Beyond Good and Error: 10,000 Kicks
“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”
— Bruce Lee
In the sport of mixed martial arts (MMA), fighters must command a diverse skill set of complementary fighting styles to gain an edge over their competition. Miesha Tate understood this and rose quickly through the women’s bantamweight division — finishing her opponents with kicks, punches, and various submission techniques — to become the champion. Now, Miesha was preparing to defend her title against someone whose fights only ended one way: with an arm bar submission in the first minute of the round. Her name was Ronda Rousey.
When champion and challenger finally met in the octagon, Miesha brought her entire arsenal to bear on Ronda: strikes, grappling, and submission attempts. Ronda shrugged it off and answered with what she knew best: a sensational arm bar submission in the fourth minute of round one.
Miesha continued training, focusing specifically on take down and arm bar defense. Ronda, meanwhile, sharpened her weapon of choice — finishing her next fight in under a minute, again, via arm bar. The fight after that: arm bar, round one. Appearing on “The Tonight Show” to promote the upcoming rematch with Miesha, Ronda even arm barred the host!
Rousey and Tate met again in December of 2013 at UFC 168, this time with Ronda as the defending champion. Miesha’s training paid off. She frustrated Ronda as no one had previously managed to do, pushing the fight into the third round, before getting caught in what? What else, an arm bar!
In the field of coding, programmers must command a diverse, and ever-evolving skill set of complementary tools and algorithms in order to effectively tackle their business requirements. We have just seen that sometimes, having absolute mastery over one skill can deliver superior results over simply having a bigger tool box. So what should that skill be?
While everyone’s toolbox may be different, Vilfredo Pareto can help us all. The Pareto principle, commonly known as the “80/20 rule” — or, more relevant for our example, “the law of the vital few” — states that generally, 80% of the output is derived from 20% of the input. Of all the operators/functions/patterns/algorithms/etc. you know, you’ll tend to use about 20% repeatedly (and 20% of those, more often still). These are your “vital few.” To take SQL as an example, this line of reasoning will most likely lead you to the LEFT OUTER JOIN.
Nearly everyone knows what a LEFT JOIN does, but considering that it may be the operation you perform most often, how familiar are you with its finer points? How does it handle nulls in your DBMS? Should filtering be done in the ON clause or the WHERE clause? Would you know how to use it to pivot a set of data? In short, do you know it well enough to use its intricacies as part of your design process? If so, what is your second most used tool, and how well do you know that one?
Sensei Lee started us on this exploration and I would like to wrap up with another of his immortal lines: “The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus.” Attaining mastery in a given skill means seeing it from every angle and all at once. Until you have done that, laser-like focus will forever elude you, since you can not focus on that which you can’t see. So, keep practicing. Perform that proverbial kick as many times as it takes to unlock its full potential — and yours!
“Purity is something that cannot be attained except by piling effort upon effort.”
― Tsunetomo Yamamoto, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai
I hope you’ve enjoyed this thought experiment. For a glimpse at mastery in action, let’s end on a lighter note: all of Ronda’s MMA arm bars, in order. Until next time.
This article is part of a series.
