Doing something wrong*, getting away with it, and starting to believe that what you are doing is the right way just because you aren’t facing immediate consequences, or you aren’t aware of them, is one of the most dangerous mistakes.
There was a time when I would not have given much importance to this. But today, I have come to think that it is one of the most dangerous ways to self-ruin because it is often quiet. It doesn’t feel like the ruin is happening. On the contrary, it feels like winning and advancing.
Note: Wrong in this context can refer to universal moral principles in society, like something unjust, dishonest, or cruel.
It can mean wrong in the sense of virtue and character development, by reinforcing an unhealthy disposition. It’s about what repeated behaviour is turning you into. For instance, a student chooses the easiest possible task whenever they can and thus, at some point, ends up not cultivating the abilities needed to achieve their purpose. As a consequence, they will likely develop the habit of succumbing under pressure. “Getting away with it” in such a context means the student remains unaware of their limitations until they get a harsh reality check. It means that the weakness of the habit they were ingraining becomes visible only when they face a tough challenge they can’t avoid.
Lastly, it can mean wrong in relation to a path, art, craft, profession, and so on: doing actions that are incongruent with the thing you are pursuing. In this context, wrong isn’t necessarily wrong in the first moral sense I mentioned, but it can often be combined with the second, character-development moral sense. Here, it means something that is technically mistaken, inefficient, counterproductive, and not consistent with the discipline’s principles.
For example, let’s say a beginner sees that during light sparring they can land punches even though they lean forward and are unbalanced. Since their sparring partner is also inexperienced, they don’t punish that mistake. And the coach doesn’t point it out either, for some reason. Consequently, they think this is always the right way to strike. But against a more experienced and cunning opponent, they will be controlled and countered easily, thus leaving them with a sense of confusion about what just happened. Therefore, their temporary success blinded them to a habit that was “wrong” relative to the martial path they are pursuing.
In this article, I will focus more on the second and especially the third meaning of “wrong.”
One of my greatest realizations as I started training was that “I succeeded” and “I did it correctly” were not always identical claims.
In general, failure is easy to understand. It is a straightforward and honest messenger, even though, more often than not, it is an unpleasant one, emotionally speaking.
You touch the stove, you get burned, you learn the lesson.
The lesson arrives immediately, or at least in the short term, so it is impossible to ignore it. As a Buddhist teaching puts it:
“Pain is the greates carrier of awareness.”
But please, let us not mistake this phrase in the sense that masochistic pain is the solution to our development here. 😂 Because, if anything, it is a sign that one’s awareness is not centred and that a lot of shadow work is needed.
But that’s a topic for another article that I can write in the A Zen Stoic publication I recently opened.
Moving on, success is a different kind of teacher, and it can be a more treacherous one because it smoothly keeps feeding you those wrong lessons we mentioned earlier. And our ego is happy with it because it is rejoicing in the illusion of progress.
But ironically, the illusion of progress becomes part of real progress sooner or later. So:
A mistake that hurts you can teach you a lesson, and a mistake that rewards you often becomes part of who you are.
Think of someone who is driving a car at 200 km/hour, about 124 mph.
Let’s say that, for the first time, nothing happens. They get that adrenaline rush and reach their destination. In that moment, a crucial self-imposed illusion is born in this person’s mind because the honest thing, in this case, would be to attribute this “feat” to luck.
But what do they do?
They start internalizing this as an overconfident, “I can handle this.”
They don’t interpret their survival as evidence of luck, but as evidence of skill and control.
But is this really the case?
How much control do you really have at that speed?
My driving instructor used to tell me that up to 90 km/hour, about 55.9 mph, you control the car. Past that speed, your degree of control starts to decline proportionally at an insane rate.
So these people begin to believe that they are very different from the people who crashed while driving at that speed, that those people were incapable, and so on.
With time, each safe arrival becomes a brick in the wall that builds their self-imposed illusion. What started from recklessness starts to become the illusion of competence, until reality crashes into it.
And unfortunately, more often than not, it comes with tragic consequences.
I can relate to this experience because there was a time when I engaged in such recklessness behind the wheel.
Regardless, one of the most powerful lessons that is still imprinted in my mind today is one I got in the ring.
It was about eighteen years ago, back during my first amateur fights. I won my first bout and was doing great in sparring overall at that time. And for a while, I let these wins become exactly what my ego wanted. I let them become exactly what I needed to numb myself from my insecurities.
I started to convince myself that I was very good.
I mean, I was doing great for a fresh amateur, but I wasn’t at the level of “good” I had convinced myself I was.
In reality, the thing was that I was fortunate in my matchups. My coach tried tactfully to make me aware of this back then, but I wouldn’t listen to reason because my inflated ego was in the way.
My first opponents were pressure fighters and sluggers who mostly came forward, because they were also inexperienced like me. They wanted to trade and fought at a rhythm I was already comfortable with.
I got my adrenaline pumping fighting them, and winning these first matches felt like unquestionable proof of skill.
Emphasis on “unquestionable” here...
In reality, it was really proof of the fact that I had favourable draws and that I had not been tested against different kinds of fighting styles yet.
In retrospect, think of the rock-paper-scissors game.
Back then, I was the rock. When I look back today, those matchups feel like rocks and scissors, but no paper.
Of course, the wins were a result of my efforts. There’s no denying that.
The problem was the conclusion I drew from those wins.
And so the thing that grows in every young man who is winning began to grow in me.
Call it what it was: hubris.
It was the inflated, adolescent feeling of overconfidence that I had figured out things that many around me had not.
More than arrogance, what was even more dangerous was the fact that the arrogance was being fed by real results.
This is something that happens often at that age because, at that age, you have usually not yet met the opponents holding the “kryptonites” that dismantle and undo your fighting style.
And for me, that “kryptonite” back then was an opponent who could combine counter-striking with outboxing very well.
That fighter was skilled at doing many things my comfort could not absorb, which was, as I said, combining counter-striking with outboxing.
He picked up on my frame of mind and started doing what came more naturally to him: letting me come to him and punishing me for it, over and over.
And when I would snap out of my instant shock to retaliate, he was already gone, out of range.
I still remember the frustration of trying to gain an advantage by throwing punches after sparks flashed in my vision. My fists would swing into empty space, never landing where I needed them to.
I felt so powerless.
A mix of anger and frustration was building in me.
What had worked against other fighters similar to my style was being used against me because my game was mostly built for opponents who would meet me at close range, and this guy cunningly refused.
It felt like I had no answer to this problem because I had never needed one up to that point.
Yes, my coach was a counter-striker as well, but apparently he made the mistake of not going all out on me. I wish he had because I would have learned the lesson faster.
But, as they say, it went that way for a reason, so there’s no use ruminating on that now.
My opponent ended up winning on points.
But I swear to God, there was a moment when I was hit with a counter right uppercut where I really believed that was it.
It was my pride and determination, combined with the fact that my opponent was tired and didn’t have enough experience, that kept me going.
An experienced opponent would not have let that window of opportunity slip by and would have overwhelmed me without thinking twice.
With enough distance, and no longer clouded by pride and a hurt ego, here’s the honest lesson I extracted from that fight:
That loss was one of the best things that happened to me during that period.
That loss taught me way more than the first wins.
I couldn’t swallow this harsh truth back then because I was blinded by emotion.
It is understandable not to get some lessons in the short term, and we should give ourselves time for the mud to settle at the bottom and the water to become clear again.
But I can see it clearly now.
I was blessed with that early loss, when the stakes were only an amateur match and a hurt ego, rather than later, when the cost would have been way higher and the slap from karma far more brutal.
This is the thing with karma: the more we resist the lesson, the more intense its nudges become...
That loss deflated my hubris while it was still soft and had not yet crystallized into a more solid, dysfunctional self-esteem mechanism. One that would not only blind me to lessons, but would cause me more emotional pain than good in the long run.
But still, this wasn’t the last episode where my hubris would be deflated.
One of these days, I will share in my other A Zen Stoic publication my experience as a beggar, something a mentor of mine asked me to go through.
A false belief that has crystallized as part of your identity is harder to deal with because, to remove it, you have to be willing to lose a piece of yourself.
And many people would rather keep the comfortable lie than survive the truth.
Another lesson I learned back then was a new objective in my martial path:
To become well-rounded.
To train against the fighting styles I could not handle.
To understand fighter psychology better.
And it is, without a doubt, one of the episodes that sparked my passion for combining my background in psychology with my love for martial arts, a passion that continues to this day.
I started to actively seek sparring opponents with styles that frustrated me, who refused to play the game at my rhythm, who sabotaged my strategies.
I started to build parts of myself that my good fortune had kept me blind to.
And this is the quiet mercy that comes from early defeat: it does not only correct your mistakes, but it also shows you the parts of your fighting style that you neglected.
A win can’t always show you that, especially a win that did not test your weaknesses.
It is the loss that clarifies the map of who you have to become.
I want to be careful here because it would be easy to twist this into something off and untrue, as if I’m saying, “Losing is good.”
That is not what I mean at all.
Losing is not good. Losing is losing, period.
The point is sharper and stranger than that.
What I am saying is that there are times when losing is necessary, especially when we don’t take heed of the lessons for some time.
The point is also that winning for the wrong reason is one of the most corrupting things that can happen to someone because it teaches them to trust the exact thing that will one day break them.
Remember what happened to Rocky when he lost his first fight with Clubber Lang in Rocky III?
That’s exactly the kind of rude awakening I am talking about.
If someone is undefeated while having a hole in their game, they are not truly strong. They may be strong in a specific area, but if we broaden the perspective, they are fragile in some ways they cannot see.
They carry flaws without being aware of them, and every win inside the comfort zone will only make the eventual reckoning larger.
On the other hand, the person who discovers their flaw or hole early and closes it through sparring and coaching, before the actual match, is the one doing more solid work.
Even though their record may look worse, the truth is that they are training to become more whole in places where fighters consumed by hubris might remain blind.
That’s it for this week, dear reader.
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