Think, then Do

Erich, Glenn, Michael

As new readers join us, I like to give a heads-up that this series of articles is in a notional order. They work best if read from the beginning of the series. But that’s not required. You do you.

Today I’d like to tell you about three friends I happened to meet through martial arts training. Erich, Glenn, and Michael. I suspect having the trait they illustrate may draw people to martial arts training, rather than the training particularly teaching anyone to be this way. Correlation isn’t causation. But maybe some people find an element in their training that I’m not seeing.

Erich is a programmer by trade, and also by avocation. I suspect that programming calls a certain sort of person because it gives the means to make ideas real. When I think of Erich, in addition to seeing a quite-skilled martial artist, and a programmer, I think of a wizard. He would be the sort of wizard who could produce objects or creatures by thinking very hard about what was wanted, and molding some energy until it was convinced to become the thing he envisioned.

Working in IT for almost thirty years,I know quite a lot of programmers. Few of them are like Erich. A combination of curiosity, energy, impressive thinking, rigorous learning, and creativity combine with the tools of our modern technology to allow Erich to create. And create he does.

I may have mentioned in previous articles the trivia contest that I and my friends engage in each year. Erich has for many years been a mainstay. Not just on the weekend it happens, but in imagining and then producing the unique tools our team uses to operate. We’ve migrated through three platforms over decades, and, along with a few other team members, Erich has evolved the tools, rewritten them, flared out new and amazing features, heard requirements and achieved them, and in all ways provided technical solutions that just fit into how we play and make us faster, better, and focused on the parts of the game we enjoy.

On Trivia Weekend, Erich is one of our best “searchers.” It’s less about knowing things and more about knowing what to look for in this game. But knowing a lot of things, very broad knowledge, gives a leg up to searching. Erich isn’t a specialist, he has a thirst for all sorts of knowledge. He’s the person in a conversation who drops the actually-interesting tidbits.

But so is Michael. Like Erich, Michael’s professional interests are technical. He came from a programming origin, and has built impressive things that way. Following that career, Michael chased his interest in music to build a brilliant studio. Applying old and new techniques to shape and manage sound, he created a gem of a space. His work in that field connected him with a preeminent school for music and theater where he could put his broad knowledge and intensity to good use.

If he was a Wizard, Michael would be the kind who could see the future, and bring us bits of it. His constant immersion in what’s new, what’s coming, and in the tools as well as their foundational history, gives him tremendous vision. Some people slow down after doing great things, but Michael keeps going. New ideas, new knowledge, and always sharing and describing and engaging with people to raise their excitement about what’s on the horizon.

Trivia isn’t the only thing it’s fun to do with people like Erich and Michael. They are ringers on any escape-room or other puzzle team. Really any activity where “figuring it out” features prominently is one you want this sort of Competent person participating in. I’ve talked about Competent people as the ones who relish a challenge and can handle what comes. Glenn is like that.

Glenn was renting space from the martial arts school I was attending, teaching a different art. I took classes from him as well and was impressed with his demeanor and his teaching. I always noted his supremely calm good nature. Finding and removing our “buttons” so as to control temper, anger, frustration, and other emotional traps is so associated with martial arts that it’s the theme of most movies about martial artists. It’s also usual to meet people who train hard, but who have only a veneer of calm. Martial artists like to adopt Yoda-like exterior qualities. Many of them never see much impact on their interior lives. Glenn’s calm is more than skin deep.

In his other life, Glenn is a Biologist. He spent many years with a big cat rescue. If any work requires patience and calm, along with precision, care, knowledge, and a sense of humor, wildlife rescue with apex predators would surely be that work. His retention of all appendages in working order speaks to his skills.

Glenn has written science books for children. Like Erich and Michael, he’s always got a story or bit of knowledge ready to hook your interest. More than most MA teachers, Glenn sweeps his pursuit of knowledge into his own training and into his teaching. Maybe a bit trite, but to round out this wizard triad, Glenn is the nature one, who morphs himself into different forms (you really should see him train sometime) but also connects with animals and the natural world.

So why these three in an article about Competence? It’s the “renaissance” quality. Each of these folks is excellent at multiple things. In no way a “jack of all trades, master of none.” On the contrary, they’re able to be experts on more than one topic, and know a whole lot about many topics. But that knowledge is applied. They don’t read magazine articles and regurgitate, these are folks who engage in building and participating in real things. They apply what they know to make new things.

When I first described what a “Competent” person is like, I talked about someone who you would go to first or in a bad situation because they would take action. When no one knows how to do something, these are the ones who figure out what to do and then do it. Without using the gendered “Renaissance man” shortcut to describe it, Competent people know a lot, and create based on what they know.

As we go along in these articles, hopefully the descriptions of each person are showing more than just the article’s topic characteristic. The real magic is in how this array of qualities and skills weaves into profound effectiveness. For any given quality you may know someone who has it in great measure, but who doesn’t achieve goals or turn that strength into “winning” at having a life they build for themselves. The inner workings of someone who learns constantly and then can creatively apply that knowledge are hard to fathom. But I hope the examples in these articles help show the shape of Competence expressed this way.