Most of you have seen this beautiful video that is currently making the rounds on internet…

Great video, music & story…

However,

I am not sure it happened the way the video is sequenced…

In fact, I am sure it did not!

Also,

• You are not supposed to hunt or bring anything up from below when diving with air tanks – which the guy was if we believe he chased the octopus for over 3 min.
• How do you go about diving holding a camera AND a gun? you only have two hands, unless of course if you are the octopus…

That is today’s world in a nut-shelled metaphor: unless you have a perfect story, or body, etc… nobody listens or sees you – Instant fame is very often made up – it gives a sense of inadequacy to most people that can never meet up with these non-real expectations – it gives them the sense that their lives are sub par… when they are not!

Life happens more like Sandman’s elephant story :

(…) Remembering the encounter in 1986, (…) he walked right up to the elephant and stared back in wonder.

The elephant trumpeted again, wrapped its trunk around one of Peter legs and slammed him against the railing, killing him instantly. (…)

at ground level, life is smelly, dirty & cares not for happy endings… that what makes the beauty of it, in my view.

What happens to the lesson when we tell lies?

Like this Zen master of old making oddly shaped pancakes; “perfect!” would he say after each; when a student asked him why he was saying “perfect” when the pancakes were obviously not, he replied:

… “perfect”!

Osu!

Google has a convenient tool to measure and compare search trends; it is very easy to use: all you must do is enter the keywords you would like to compare and you get a comparison of the volume of searches conducted over the last 6 years. Fortunately the results come in a graphic form. The Huffington Post is also running a very funny article on Google trends.

I played with it to explore, identify or confirm trends in martial arts; I wanted to know where Kyokushin Karate is at. The findings are not perfect; we are looking at searches: some things are better known and require less searches; which key words to choose to find the trend is also important. There are other reasons too but I think the broad strokes are correct and reveal or confirm interesting trends.

Step 1: Calibration.

Let’s start by comparing the world of martial arts with …golf: we find out that even though golf seems to be on a down trend, it is an order of magnitude (10 times or more) bigger than martial arts. Golf is also seasonal.

Step 2: The influence of big media.

If it is not on TV, it does not exist! To compare what is on TV, I chose K1, the big karate kickboxing events, boxing and UFC, the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

Over the last 6 years, UFC has risen from non existent to the point of challenging boxing. K1 plateaued in 2006 and has been in a downtrend ever since (not very visible at this scale).

Also visible are the large spikes up for boxing, but especially UFC; the regular pattern of 10 or 12 peaks a year corresponds to the monthly big fights and shows the importance of the cards, events and fights.

Step 3: Comparing the disciplines.

What is moving up or down between karate, tae kwon do (W.T.F.), and MMA (Mixed Martial Arts)?

MMA is obviously on a very powerful rise while karate is going down. Tae Kwon Do is increasing, but from a lower level - WTF (red line) is actually 50% higher than it appears on the graphic: the choice of key words was important because the searches are roughly 2/3rd for WTF (shown) and 1/3rd for Tae Kwon Do (not shown).

Step 4: What about the different karate styles?

Shotokan has been dropping fast while kyokushin seems stable. I added BJJ (Brazilian Jiu Jitsu) which is an important part of MMA; we find that like MMA, BJJ is on a strong rising trend.

Step 5: What did we learn?

Outside of the fact that Golf is bigger than martial arts, we identified the following trends:

1. Your art popularity will benefit from TV exposure. (Some “sports” even seem to be the directly issued from TV…)
2. MMA is on a powerful trend.
3. Tae Kwon Do in also on the rise, but not as much.
4. Karate is trending down,
5. but within karate, Kyokushin appears stable while Shotokan is dropping.
6. BJJ is riding the MMA trend up.

What do you think? Is Google trends confirming what you already knew, or were you surprised by the above results? Do you think I missed something? Please share your insights in the space below.

I am a big fan of Leo Barbauta; for those of you that don’t know who Leo is, he is the very successful author of Zen Habits and mnmlist. I don’t always agree with Leo, but I often enjoy his writing and value his opinions; his blogs are worth subscribing to.

Today he brought a problem to me. The price of convenience is IMHO misguided. It promotes the wrong reasons to do the right things; which is right…

…and wrong!

Sometimes people you love seem to do the right things for the wrong reasons. How do you go about telling them?

In the case of Leo, my choice is simple and “minimalist”. I am listing my thoughts and sharing “my truth” next to his, to create points of reference. I included some links that are pointing to further research should you wish to.

(Leo’s article snippets are in quotes, followed by my thoughts and comments.)

If there is one direction modern society has been moving in during the last century, it is convenience…

I don’t think so… If it is true that convenience is a trend, society has been marching at the drums of growth, cancerous growth.

We’re a society of conveniences, more than anything else. But at what price?

Yes, only the first world is; and the question is at what COST! The price itself is irrelevant.

The global warming crisis, for example, has been entirely caused by conveniences (…)

Ahem — says who? Whose arrogance lends so much power to man? Should we declare bad weather …illegal?

I think we’re going to need to rethink our love of conveniences.

Yes we are, we will be forced to – Humanity is going to have to learn to think, indeed.

The obesity epidemic has also been caused by conveniences.

Is obesity an epidemic? Ignoring the 963,000,000 hungry & self-pity are indeed convenient.

(…) The cost of that convenience, of course, is our health and our environment — small prices to pay, perhaps.

Leo confuses cost and price. There is a flaw in our accounting that conveniently ignores costs. (you could google “cosmic cost accounting” and Buckminster Fuller to find out more).

(…) Sometimes that cost is to the Third World, or to the environment, or to our own future, but hey, that’s Somebody Else’s Problem.

On spaceship earth, there is no “else”, no “elsewhere” & no “away”…

(…) It’s inconvenient to hang dry clothes, but it’s also pleasant and sustainable.

Sustainable? Yikes, that word again! Bending to the fad? Hanging clothes to dry is regenerative, eternally regenerative in an “Eternally Regenerative Universe”, not sustainable.

(…) yet it’s worth the price of inconvenience. (…) it’s much more enjoyable (…)

Introducing Value to Price & Cost adds to the confusion; I respect Leo’s opinion, and may even agree with him; however, turning Luddite is not the path of least resistance.

What inconveniences can we incorporate into our daily lives …?

Great question!

Learning to think for ourselves.

Hummm… How about learning to think for ourselves? doing the right things for the right reasons? Researching the proper distinctions between price, cost and value? Verifying the definitions of the words we use that shape our thoughts?

What has this got to do with karate? For me it has everything to do with a search for the truth, “veritas”. This is what my karate journey is about after all.

Leo, thank you for your otherwise enlightening articles, I wish that down the road, my journey brings us close and we get a chance to share a cup of coffee and have a conversation.

Osu!

Post Scriptum: I want to put forth that karate Journey is a very young blog & it is true that confronting Leo’s arguments will draw traffic; however, the matters addressed are too high in my heart to stay idle; I hope you will forgive me.

There are no reasons in the world for me to race across the world in Chris Guillebeau’s fashion to tick and mark all countries on the UN list as “visited”… It is just not for me. I read once that traveling at the speed of light, one would need more time than the estimated life expectancy of the universe to simply go around the said universe. Outside of their faster than light thoughts, humans don’t seem to be designed for this sort of enterprise…

Nevertheless, at times, Chris comes up with a jewel that strikes a chord; I would like to echo him and share the following poem with you today:

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.

- Mary Oliver

Yes Mary, one day I finally knew…

I was on the phone when my friend told me he was feeling 7 feet tall and on top of the world… I thought I did too & asked Helena, our photoshop wizard in China to slightly alter the following picture and replace the original lion with my good face:

… May you be inspired …

I have just pinpointed the transformational theme of my karate journey would not do justice to what happened: it exploded in my head! The brutal overwhelming violence of the emotion has only started to recede…

My neighbor on this flight to Singapore is a young man in his late twenties. He is a Chinese ethnic from Singapore. He mentioned being involved with the design and manufacturing of ship anchors, but until then, he looked more to me like a computer whiz of sorts. He was shivering in the cold of Shanghai; indeed it was snowing yesterday, he must be happy to return home to ‘sunny Singapore’.

I was thinking about Greece a while earlier and drifted from today’s financial crisis to ancient Sparta; I wondered how a mob of citizens on a rampage, breaking the treasures of their own nation to entice foreigners to rescue them would be dealt with in the glory days of Leonidas? I do not know, for sure, but I can imagine…

Why did I think of Sparta in the first place?

“The War Of Art” & Steven Pressfield who is also the author of “Gates Of Fire” took me there. This morning, in preparation of this trip, I grabbed the book from the neglected part of my collection, thinking that today was as good as any to make good on my decision to read it… If I am to write a blog, I might as well read a book on creativity & the overcoming of writer’s block.

“Gates Of Fire” was a favorite novel of mine way before “The 300’s”, the movie. It is an epic re-count of the battle of Thermopylae, from the eyes of a Helot, a Spartan slave. Pressfield uses the Spartan knight Polynikes’ explorations of the nature of Phobos, The Fear in Greek, as a recurring theme and sub plot in his book.

So here I am at 10,000m of altitude, next to a ship anchor geek, in an Airbus A300 from China Eartern Airways that has seen much better days, trying to make sense of what just flashed through my mind and knocked my wind out; thinking about Greece, then taken to Sparta, then fear… The introspective Spartan Ploynikes, at the end of Pressfield’s novel finally understands before dying that “love is the contrary of fear”. The first step on the road of my karate journey reveals love to be its theme…

As of right now, I sure don’t understand what is happening, I just know it is; hang around, Dear Reader, as the dust settles and we progress along the way, as the pages unfold, we’ll see and discover together where this is taking us.