It's not how well you withstand force

Most people think martial arts is all about kicking ass.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

It’s about cultivating yourself on multiple levels to endure, grow, and eventually master yourself in ways that only very few individuals can achieve.

That’s why in the original style of Tai Chi, there are only ever four grandmasters in the world at any given time. All of them can trace their lineage back to the village from which the art was developed, and to this day, that village has the highest concentration of skilled practitioners in the world. If you want to become recognized as one of the disciples of this style, it’s a requirement to travel there to be acknowledged.

My late master was one of those individuals.

This week, this is what I’ll be sharing, and as you can already guess, a lot of it is going to be pulled from my decades of experience as a martial artist.

It is not about power…

The central tenet of Tai Chi is not in force, but in resilience. Whereas most other martial art styles start from the hard motions and end up with softer motions, Tai Chi starts from the opposite end.

This is why it’s largely inaccessible to young people.

It’s also why this particular craft is as well. Both start from the less flashy side of the mountain, but this is also the much more challenging side to understand.

In the case of writing, you have to start with yourself as the product rather than some external pitch. The stories, lessons, and insights that you impart must all be anchored from your experiences to be true to yourself before you can build a world for your reader, whether it be fictitious or not.

Every martial art requires you to understand hard and soft movements, that all power is generated from mastery of biomechanical motion, that it takes years to achieve the fine muscle control for any significant efficacy to emerge for application.

Unfortunately, the art of “bulshido” is alive and well, both in the martial arts world as well as in the content creation one.

That’s a topic for another time. For now, let’s talk about resilience.

It is about grace

Resilience is about how to bend to outside force, redirect it, and use it against the opponent.

It’s about adaptation to whatever the world has to throw at you, and how you manage and develop this skill is one of the keystones of building a digital heirloom. With AI, everyone can generate reams of slop for consumption, but people still want a real connection at the other end of that rope.

Being adaptable to every situation is the difference between being on survival mode all the time and thriving in your corner of the world. You have to be scrappy, lean, and hungry for the majority of the time. You can’t afford to sit on your laurels for too long. As they say, the cheese might move or disappear, and if you’re caught flat-footed, you’re going to be lost…

“Who Moved My Cheese” by Spencer Johnson is a must read, by the way.

Knowing how to take a punch to the face and persist in your efforts is the only difference between failure and success.

What’s that got to do with a digital legacy?

You’ve overcome obstacles in your time on this planet.

What you leave behind are lessons and insights that share how you did so. Without these stories, there’s no meaningful legacy to be had. How many times as your father told you how they went to school in the pouring rain and uphill both ways with a river full of piranhas between them and only a rickety bridge on which to cross? Or that time when they were in the marines and all they had were sticks…two sticks…and a rock…and they had to share the rock.

If you didn’t get that last reference, you didn’t play Halo enough.

The point is this: that overcoming obstacles and solving problems aren’t normally as straightforward as they are on Netflix. We may be the heroes in the story of our lives, but building a digital heirloom is about putting the audience in our place with us as a guide.

This is the critical part of your digital legacy.

It’s not about you.

Stay awhile and listen…

Think about a time when you got handed a steaming pile of hardship fresh from the bowels of life.

How did you bounce back (you’re here and reading this so you survived)? What did it teach you about yourself? Jot this down on your favorite writing platform or note-taking app or leather-bound notebook. Then share it with a friend and ask them to share something similar.

You might be surprised just how many of these you have and how they connect you to others.

Next time, we’ll talk about the core again…where resilience comes from.