TL;DR
If the way we approach success is anything like a flight, then we spend too much time practicing for the time spent in air, and way too little time practicing for the time spent close to the ground. Ironically, the pilots become fully attentive the closer they are to the ground, and are more likely to activate auto-pilot when in the air. It may help to master the fundamentals of “falling” — handling setbacks and protecting against failure. Sustainable success begins with embracing and mitigating the downside. This “ground” — whether humility, resilience, or foundational skills — must be identified and mastered to reduce risk and build confidence for higher aspirations.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth - Mathew 5:5
There is significant asymmetry between the ease of building and destroying, rising and falling, and making and breaking. Consider for example, that it can take only seconds to destroy a reputation that has taken a lifetime to build. A friend recently captured this asymmetry very nicely by pointing out that whenever you try to rise (build), there are a thousand forces stopping you, but when you try to fall (destroy), everyone makes way for you; one is painful and time-consuming, and the other is instantaneously cataclysmic.
It is counterintuitive that given how much easier it is to experience a cataclysmic fall, the prevailing wisdom on how to live a good life that aims at success is focused on teaching how to build, and rise. At first glance it seems to be the right approach. Since the literature on how to build, rise and stay up is voluminous, I will only talk about the fall and the ground in this article. On second thought, is it a good thing that we focus so much on how to build and rise? There are very few ways to succeed, but there are many ways to fail. It seems logical to me that the pursuit of sustainable success should start out by ruling out as many ways to fail as is possible to rule out; you want to protect your downside.
The judokas seem to have known this all along.
A Judo black belt recently told me this: “In Judo, our home is the ground. We are happy and comfortable on it because we have mastered what it takes to be there, and so we don’t fear it; we go there when we must, gently, because when you try too hard to not go to the ground you cannot fight freely”.
You don’t have to stay too long in a Judo session to understand how fundamental this sort of thinking is to its practitioners. Every training session starts with repeated practice of the various falling techniques, and every new convert spends quite a number of weeks practicing these on their own, under supervision.
One day at the dojo, two judokas were in randori, and everyone else was watching on intently. A potentially dangerous situation emerged, and the sensei called off the sparring. He then took a moment to address those of us who were seated around the combattants in a circle: “If you resist falling for so long and get injured, you may never practice Judo again. You should try to be so comfortable falling that it is a tool in your tool box for countering your opponent’s attacks. Take falling away as a losing position your opponent can push you into, and make it a tool you can use to stay long enough in the fight”. In Judo, those who are happy with the fall attack ferociously.
I spent some time reflecting on what I witnessed at the dojo, and I realized that the wisdom that lie therein was not only confined to judo. In many aspects of our lives, we can do marvelous things if we are comfortable that our downside is protected; if we are so comfortable being in situations that will otherwise be regrettable, and have found ways to transform positions that the prevailing consensus considers to be positions of weakness into positions of strength.
In Judo as in aviation, the ground seems to be particularly important.
Although pilots spend only about 17% of flight time operating in phases close to the ground (takeoff, maneuvering, approach and landing), these phases account for over 70% of all aviation accidents1. It appears that a pilot who cannot land an aircraft has no business flying, and a pilot who has mastered the art of landing and taking off will not fear a thousand flights.
If we are truly intentional about succeeding at ambitious goals, we have to fall in love with the ground, and spend as much time as we spend practicing and falling in love with the “ground”. The most appropriate interpretation of the “ground” is contextual, and could be about building the virtues of humility, simplicity, and resilience, honesty, frugality, and who knows?
Just as the number 42 being the answer to the “Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything” is fictional, anyone who purports to have a universally binding interpretation of the ground is something out of a science fiction book.
For each undertaking, there is nonetheless an appropriate interpretation of the ground, and it is our responsibility to search for, and fall in love with it before we try to fly. It will be boring, it will take a long time, but it will cover 70% of risk of accidents.