You're always good enough; you're never good enough
The alpha and omega of karate and teaching
In an article I read recently, the author complained about cultural standards which make people feel they’re “just not good enough.” That phrase is an emblem of personal trauma, whether inflicted by parents who were always critical, the cutthroat competition of career advancement, untenable societal ideals, or one’s own unrelenting perfectionism. In popular psychology, it’s often invoked to be rejected, to insist that the way to mental well-being is to emphatically assured that you are indeed good enough. Hence the popularity of affirmations reminding us that we’re beautiful, smart, and worthy of love.
This is also a basic tenet of karate, its alpha principle. Our dojo welcomes everyone with a warm heart, a good soul, and a genuine desire to learn. We don’t care about race, religion, gender-identification, sexual orientation, age, body type, fitness level, athletic ability, wealth, looks, or any other parameter by which people get commonly sorted. If you respect others and our traditions—if you’re not a racist, antisemite, Islamophobe, sexist, ageist, homophobe, transphobe, or other kind of bigot—and are open, humble, disciplined, and patient enough, we will respect you in return and do our very best for you. The man who leads Seibukan world-wide, Shimabukuro Zenpō Sensei, says “Karate ni wa jinshu mo kokkyō mo nai”: karate has neither race nor borders. You are absolutely good enough for karate.
However, it’s simultaneously a basic tenet that you’ll never, ever be good enough at karate.
We see no contradiction. “You’re good enough” is an abbreviation of “you’re good enough just the way you are”: you don’t have to change a thing, except the view that you’re not good enough. This is wedded to deeply cherished convictions about ourselves and others. For boomers like me, Billy Joel’s lesson was real love means loving someone just the way they are; to a younger generation, the extrapolation by Bruno Mars was they are amazing, just the way they are. But karate is the blunt opposite: it begins by showing you that you are not good enough and far, far from amazing.
A first karate class for almost everyone is very humbling. It is lived-experience of clumsiness; you can’t seem to move the right way or even move the correct arm or leg. You can’t stand properly. Sometimes, it’s just too much; sometimes we never see a beginner again, even though we do our very best to be welcoming and supportive. The ones who do come back learn that they have embarked on a demanding, unending, and regularly painful quest of transformation.
The difficult gift of karate is an eternal recurrence: it forces you to face, over and over, in the most tangible ways, your limitations and weaknesses. It never stops doing so. In karate, as opposed to some academic cultural politics, we embrace impossible standards. We look to the very best exponents in the world, to expert practitioners who are much better than us. They set the ideals we never reach, but nonetheless continually work toward. Every day, karate proves we need to be stronger, faster, more supple, more precise, more balanced, more graceful. Each class and each practice by ourselves are reminders that we’re not good enough. Each proves we have so much more to learn.
This may seem harsh, but in the end, it’s no different than being a serious student of anything. Wisdom has no finite limits, just as science always changes, evolves, and grows. There will always be more to know. Besides, even on a pragmatic level, if you truly knew enough, whether about genetics or Shakespeare, if you have mastered all the necessary knowledge and requisite skills, why go to school at all? In this age of explosively propelled misinformation, we see the catastrophic results of the unseriousness of YouTube and other social media: the grossly undereducated, certain they are indeed good enough just the way they are, proliferate dangerous ignorance and idiocy across epidemiology, the biology of sex, geopolitics, the world.
The fundamental requirement of genuine learning is acknowledging you need to be better; you are not good enough just the way you are. In karate, we think that acknowledgment—which is a form of humility that’s become terribly rare—turns out to be more positive than the positivity of affirmations. It says, without reservation, that you can become better. It says if you are open to learning and practice seriously enough, you will.
But the process never ends, which is why never being good enough is the omega principle of the way of karate. When the great sensei, Chibana Chōshin, was asked what constituted the right attitude towards training, he replied, “Always thinking, ‘not yet, not yet’.” You’re not there, yet. You don’t know enough, yet. You’re not good enough, yet. Chibana was specifically speaking to karate, but the larger lesson is that he was defining the very condition of education. No matter how much you know, there is always more to learn. Your knowledge and thinking and reflection can always be better—and that’s a very good thing. There is always more; you can always learn.
Karate, at its best, is dedicated to much more than being able to fight. It is about working to become a better person in general. Hence, a crucial generalization: if we move from knowledge (whether of fighting or science or education or any other field) to character, to who and what you are, can there ever be such a thing as being good enough? Or can you be kinder? Can you always be patient? Can you be more courageous? Can you be more ethical? Can you be better as a human being?
The important lesson from Chibana Sensei is that the answer is always, “yes.” The project of karate is training in its widest sense: working in all ways you can to become a better human. From this perspective, while you will never be good enough, that’s a deeply wonderful aspect of the human condition. It gives purpose and meaning to our lives.
Another great teacher, Oota Hirokata, was still teaching his art of kendō (Japanese fencing) when he was 102 years-old. Despite having practiced for many decades, he said, “It’s important to carry on forever and be persistent. I still have a long way to go with kendō.” Karate is a way of teaching for us because our ambition is to be training when we’re 102 and saying, “I still have a long way to go with karate; I still have a long way to go in being human.”