Nova Daily - 29 April 2025
Hi!
The mini-universe that is the dojo prepares us for the challenges of the outside world.
- Iain Abernethy
To start the post with not-quite-news: I've decided to take the rest of April off in terms of playing rapid. That'll be only two days, but it's a welcome change of pace for me. These rapid games aren't stressful in and of themselves, at least not to the extent that I'd be spending my entire day obsessing over them. But still, after having played 100 of these high-intensity games over the course of four months, it is time to zoom out and evaluate the first four months of the year.
In Sunday's blog I mentioned that the means by which you plan to achieve your goal shouldn't be too rigid. You have to be willing to put your methods to scrutiny and change what doesn't work for you. This will be something that I'll explore in more depth tomorrow.
One of Iain Abernethy's greatest contributions to my thinking is his audiobook The Martial Map. In it he lays out his idea of the Venn diagram illustrated above. The different areas are distinct and different, but have crossover areas with the other two.
- Fitting good locks on your home is self-protection but has no relevance to fighting or martial arts.
- Tai-chi in the park is pure martial arts, but has no relevance to fighting or self-protection.
- A police officer arresting a suspect will need a set of fighting skills that are useless for self-protection or martial arts.
- Control of your ego has nothing to do with fighting, but is part of the martial arts character development and has a definite benefit in terms of self-protection.
- Punching a fiend in the face to incapacitate them long enough so you can run away is fighting and self-protection but not martial arts.
- Karate competitions have nothing to do with self-protection but are a part of both fighting and martial arts.
- Intense training in physical strength might potentially make you a better fighter, makes you a less likely target for attack, and instills the discipline that goes along with the martial arts.
The point is to distinguish between the areas, and the Martial Map is a tool to help you see more clearly what objectives you're training for with any individual training session that you do. That also goes for chess: memorising opening lines doesn't improve your middlegame understanding. Pattern recognition isn't the same as calculation. Great combinational prowess doesn't guarantee understanding of when and how you should liquidate. Being able to play 100 bullet games in a row doesn't give you the perseverance and the patience to grind out a minute endgame advantage for 100+ moves. These skills are different.
For today's blog I'll be discussing the sixth point of Iain Abernethy's podcast "10 things the martial arts should have taught you about life." The point below sounds like insanity, but hear me out.
6. Having trained people throw punches
at your head makes life easier.
Of course, in Iain Abernethy's case, this "throw punches at your head" is to be taken literally, as he's a karate instructor. The karate sessions at his dojo are very intense, and one of the emotions that are to be used to one's advantage is fear. By exposing the students to a regulated and progressively increasing amount of fear throughout the sessions, they get used to feeling fear, recognising fear, and by doing so they learn how to act in the face of fear.
This is greatly beneficial for personal growth. As they say, growth only happens outside your comfort zone. This is fully in line with point 2.
This works in chess as well: the best opponents for your growth are those who are just a little above your current skill-level.
You may find yourselves facing your worst fears in this room.
- Gilderoy Lockhart
When you've been pinned against the mat and headlocked by a larger and heavier opponent, it makes the annoying school bully a lot less intimidating the next day (presuming that it's not the same person). You might be able to finally have the guts to ask that colleague out on a date because what's the big deal? Harry Potter was able to ask Cho Chang to the Yule ball after having beaten a dragon.
Yes it will still move you out of your comfort zone (and indeed Harry finds talking to girls quite a bit harder than flying against a dragon).
Yes, you will still feel fear.
But if you've had worse
If you've been exposed to things that demanded much more of you
Then you'll be able to cut things to size and deal with them accordingly.
There is a reason why people who've had a near-death experience will subsequently be able to get more out of their lives. They have experienced that the end can be at any moment. So there is nothing to lose and everything to gain. Fear still exists but it fades into the background, and a world of possibilities opens up that we may not even have been aware existed.
We don't only develop a never-say-die attitude so we can fight. We develop such an attitude so we can live fully.
- Iain Abernethy
My chess
Most of the things I wrote about chess for this blog are best suited for tomorrow's blog. Still, I didn't want to end this blog without including any chess at all, so here's a few puzzles taken from some of my recent games:
I hope that I'll be able to present something cool tomorrow. I don't think that lack of inspiration should pose any problem for a change. After all, I've got 100+ blogs to draw from.
