May 1, 2019
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We lost comms.
Alpha’s a moon.
-The100.
I finished The 100 today and I'm still depressed.
Martial Arts Business: On Being Poor
Martial Arts Business: On Being Poor and Not Having Many Resources In the practice of the martial arts we often embrace opposites. For example, when the punch is coming at the face, our mind says “flinch and cringe,” but our training says, “block.” When we face a sparring partner some part of our brain might whisper (or yell), “run,” but our training has us stepping back, raising our hands, and engaging the opponent. It was a martial arts teacher who taught me that when something is bad, it might actually be good; he taught me that a lot of how we perceive things depends on how we choose to look at them. Finding the good in the bad is, I was trained, a fairly powerful form of self-defense. So I’m here to tell you, Mr. or Ms. Struggling Martial Arts School Owner, that being poor is, in many ways, actually better for your business than being wealthy. That struggling with limited resources can, sometimes, serve you better, believe it or not, than having more than enough money.
Let me explain how it works. When you have a lot of money, it’s easy to get lazy. When you’re operating with a bare-bones budget, you have to tap into your creativity, you have to become resourceful and inventive. When you have a lot of money, to advertise for example, you might buy the same ads everyone else does, in the same way. But when you’re poor, you have to choose methods of promotion that don’t rely on the almighty dollar, but that often depend on inventiveness and/or face-to-face interaction. Oh, and money can make you really stupid.
Some of my friends who make a lot of money go crazy for stupid things like cars that cost $50,000 or more than they’re really worth. They buy clothes that cost 10-times what they should --and they think they look really smart wearing them!
Unlike my friends with less “disposable income,” my friends with lots of money have houses that are too big, furniture that’s a waste of money, and they often travel to expensive places to stay in expensive hotels that insulate them from the very places they went to go “see.” They often buy ridiculously expensive watches, spend too much of their money on greasy food and pretentious wines, and generally insulate themselves in a cocoon of status symbols and designer brand names. Being cash poor isn’t necessarily about being “poor” (and "poor" in the Western World today isn't really being "poor" at all) it can be a license to look more carefully at the world around you. It’s an opportunity to embrace simplicity, which is often a far better thing than the complications that come with hoarding wealth. Being not-rich requires one to get creative, to invent, and to take advantage of the abundant resources around us, resources that often get ignored by folks who are looking for status over function. One of my favorite reminders of the advantage of not having a whole lot of money to create genius and art (in life), is in this blog by photographer Chase Jarvis. The blog is called “Care, Time, and Vision Beat Budget Every Time.” It’s about the beautiful project, “The Ice Book.”
The Ice Book (HD) from Davy and Kristin McGuire on Vimeo.
It's a reminder to me that working with a tight budget doesn't have to mean "no magic." If you're a school owner with a less-than-abundant budget to operate your school --and life --on, I'd like to suggest you embrace the opposite: See being tight as a good thing, maybe even a great thing.
Make it force you to look at what you DO have, at the resources you don't have to pay a lot for, and let it cause you to invent and create. Create a world for yourself where less is actually more.
It wouldn't be the first time we (martial artists) embrace an idea that, at first, seems like the opposite of good judgment.
Physical practice is --and will always be --one of the four legs that we stand upon. In addition to the training is education, emotional maturation, and the spiritual quest. This is our "business" --and this is the business of the work done in The 100.
This video was shot at BJ Penn's Academy in Hilo, HI - March of 2011.