Offerings to The Spirit of Practice: The Stacking of Skills
A key principle in mastery...
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Transcript (edited)
In this Offering to The Spirit of Practice, I want to discuss with you a key principle that can aid any practice that you're engaging in and that is the ability to:
Stack skills together…
Being able to stack skills together has a lot to do with mastery and you can bet that anyone who has achieved mastery has done this successfully.
A great example of this principle in action are the Chinese martial arts, which are practices that have been refined over thousands of years, have been battle-tested and reality-tested, and get transmitted from generation, to generation, to generation with a formula that is optimized to create the master.
Now, this is something that unless you are handed, you have to create for yourself.
If you can find a great teacher that shows you a particular stack of skills, then wonderful. However, if you don't have that teacher, it means that you have to find a way to stack skills together that are congruent and complementary. Not an easy task for the solo practitioner, but potentially a worthwhile goal.
Think of it as a long-term construction project:
You have a foundation. That foundation lays down the groundwork. Then from there, what you do is build the frames out, you do electricity, plumbing, insulation, you put up drywall, then you build a roof. Then from there, you might go in and paint and do the finish work.
I'm going to invite you to treat any type of skill that you are working with as something that could potentially be stacked with other skills.
Fundamentally, are they complimentary? Or do you have different overall trajectories that can be complimentary? You might have a set of practices where the skills are stackable, taking you in one direction, and then another set of practices where the skills are stackable, taking you in another direction, and so on and so on.
But the way that you stack skills together…are skills could potentially be done together. That is…the practicing of one will eventually improve the practicing of the other.
As in the case of the Chinese martial arts, for example, you start off with:
+Standing practice.
+Once you have that alignment, then you start to move with movement drills, taking that alignment into motion.
+That will then feed into the greater overall form that you will practice.
+Then you start to practice the form at slow speed.
+Then you start to practice it at medium speed.
+Then you start to practice it at high speed.
+And then finally, you start to spar with people, and you start to express that power out in the world, that then prepares you for combat.
So the question here is, what are you doing that can be complimentary together? Or for that matter, are you practicing skills that are antagonistic to each other in a way that's actually not contributing to mastery?
The greater question too is, are you okay with that?
Because if you are not really interested in the mastery of a particular set of skills, then it might not matter. If, however, you are interested in mastery, and you are practicing a set of skills that are not complimentary, but that are fundamentally antagonistic to one another, then you're fighting yourself in the process.
This is also something that can be highlighted with the internal martial arts of China.
Let's say Tai Chi, Xingyi, and Baguazhang.
These three arts work with similar alignment principles. And they work in different ways, and yet each of them is complimentary because each of them fills a hole that the other does not have while keeping the same fundamental principles in action.
So that might mean working with structure, working with internal mechanics, and keeping everything as relaxed as possible, while at the same time not being floppy. They are also eventually all going to be very fast and very explosive.
And thus, they're all building a particular house, a structure that is the same, so that you can take aspects of each and feed them into the other, so that the practice of one might improve the practice of the other, and that the practice of one might fill the gaps of the other.
And they're all stacking skills throughout the entire process. Taking one thing that can be combined with another thing, at the same exact moment, and building off of that, continuously adding layers and layers and layers.
So this is something that I want to leave you with today, is to meditate on this idea of:
Stacking skills.
That it's absolutely required for mastery.
Do you have a formula that's been handed to you, or are you building your own?
Are you interested in mastery at all?
Are the skills you're practicing contributing to one another, or are they detracting from one another?
And the way you find that out is if they are aligned with the same overall set of principles.