Humans are not taught to learn, they are taught to accumulate knowledge.
The more knowledge they accumulate, the more their ego grows.
Examine textbooks & intellectual books.
One will find a litany of ‘concepts’
A word salad of new vocabulary.
The intellectual adores this.
For he can stuff these into his pocket, and unleash his new-found knowledge at the next social gathering.
To tell his peers how many books he has read, how many concepts he knows, how much knowledge he has accumulated.
If humans were taught to walk when they are born,
There would be ‘walking academies.’
In these academies, they would isolate the foot, and call it ‘angular dorsiflexion’
And have students sit there and practice this isolated motion.
Being taught in this way, the child would chase perfection in angular dorsiflexion,
Practice it for 10,000 hours,
And 75 years into the future,
Still be found to be ‘working on it’.
To isolate a micro-motion, from the entire motion, and give it a name, and have the human focus upon it.
Is to incapacitate the human.
If one examines any human in any field, they are all still ‘working on it’.
Even though they have been in the field for 60 years, they are still ‘working on it’.
The meditator still working on enlightenment.
The athlete still working on becoming a legend.
With this logic,
Why is one not still working on walking?
Working on brushing their teeth?
Working on writing their name?
Does a golfer know how to hit a ball?
Or only when they consciously control the 4 ‘cues’ that they’ve been ‘working on’ to make sure their swing is correct?
Their hand position,
Keeping their head down,
Hands coming under, hands coming over,
Rotating with the shoulders,
Generating force from the ground up,
The tilt of the hands forward to cue the start of the swing,
And the 10,000 other components that make up the simple golf swing.
You will say that we do not continue to work on walking and brushing our teeth because they are simple actions that have meaningless consequences, and therefore do not require conscious attention past the age of 6.
But if we created a ‘Teeth Brushing World Championship’ then out of nowhere there would be entire institutions built, breaking down the technique of brushing one’s teeth into its minute details.
And yet again we would find students who are taught to learn and practice each individual component.
The whole is the whole.
It cannot be sliced into pieces
And each piece given a name.
There are no partial actions,
Only whole actions.
It is human nature,
To want to control everything,
To want to break everything down into its constituents,
To break down the technique of the greats,
In order to understand and emulate them.
Never understanding the source of the action,
Never understanding that what made the greats, the greats,
was not their technique.
This method works in mechanical processes, where a simple adjustment,
a simple piece of advice,
fixes the system.
But the artistry that we call sport, business and creative arts,
Are not mechanical processes,
And so this does not work.
In mechanical processes, you make adjustment A,
And get result B.
Every. Single. Time.
If artistry were like this,
Then all the technique adjustments,
Would work,
Every. Single. Time.
And so we must ask ourselves,
If it does not work every single time,
What are we missing?
What do we not Understand?
If all the technology,
all the tools,
all the resources,
All the high speed cameras,
All the motion sensors,
All the research papers,
All the mindset techniques,
All the books,
All the courses,
All the information,
All the coaches,
All the how-to guides,
All the years of studying the greats,
Has not led to significant increases in performance, happiness and success amongst society,
Do they really work?
What are we missing?
Simply look at the sheer volume of information available to coaches, athletes, entrepreneurs and artists,
And the difference it has made in results.
The gap in the advancement of technology & information,
And the advancement in results,
Grows wider by the year.
The source of the action, whether a putt on the 18th green at The Masters,
Or walking down the street,
Or brushing one’s teeth,
Is NOT the isolated micro-motions that make up the whole,
It is the Human Being.
When we Understand this,
When we Understand that there are only whole actions,
When we Understand the source of the action is the human being,
Our approach changes entirely.