“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth”
Mike Tyson
Have any of you trained in martial arts? If so, you will remember practising how to defend against a certain technique. With a compliant training partner. They don’t resist, they let you do it. Then at the end of the lesson, you do some sparring, fighting within the club rules. Most of the time all the techniques you have been practising go out of the window, you end up ‘brawling’. Then as you progress, you start to use some of the techniques in your sparring. In the beginning, you will throw the technique but your partner is not compliant anymore. It doesn’t work, you try again and it still doesn’t work.
Then you get punched in the mouth.
What do you do now?
Does this technique actually work?
Was this a good plan?
Do I just need to practice some more?
Does this technique work for me?
Do I actually want to fight any more?
What do I do now?
All good questions. We all need to learn to be able to answer ourselves. We need to reflect on the situation. We may need to speak to friends and mentors. But ultimately we need to decide for ourselves.
The same happens in life.
You want to lose some weight, so you try a new diet. You follow the plan to the letter. No cheating. You lose weight and feel like you are making progress. Then one week you don’t lose any weight. You might have even gained weight. You haven’t cheated, you have followed the plan meticulously.
You have been metaphorically, punched in the mouth. What do you do now?
Do you abandon the diet and go back to your old ways?
Do you pig out for a week in a depressive state?
Do you abandon the diet and move onto another diet?
Do you stick with it and keep going?
Not part of the plan
The problem is, we don’t plan for getting punched in the mouth. Getting punched in the mouth isn’t part of the plan.
When we are losing weight on a diet, if we are following the perfect diet for us, we will lose weight every week. We will not plateau. We will not gain weight. That is what we tell ourselves. That is the plan. It’s the same in martial arts. We practice the techniques against a compliant partner. We practice punching them, kicking them and throwing them. In a fight, we believe that the technique will work. We will hit them and they will not hit us. That would be the plan, the perfect plan.
But is that reasonable?
Is that logical?
Is that realistic?
If we are going to spar (or fight) surely at some point we are going to get hit. Aren’t we? Is it realistic to think we won’t get hit? You watch any fight and they both trade blows, they both get hit. Really it’s about being able to take the hit and keep fighting. Take the hit and keep moving forward. Take the hit and throw something back.
If we are losing weight, is it realistic to think we won’t plateau? Surely we have to plateau at some time? We can’t go on losing weight forever. We can’t expect to get the perfect diet right from the start. What if we are invited to a wedding, a birthday or some sort of party? What if we have a bad day and are feeling low? Surely it’s accepting we are going to have bad days. It’s knowing we are going to have a bad day and having a plan for getting to back on the horse.
What if we had a plan for the next time we failed?
If we are sparring, what if we had a plan for the time we got punched? That we have to cover up. Or throw a jab. Or throw a leg kick. Or go for a take-down. Or bob and weave.
If we are dieting, what if we had a plan when we don’t lose weight.
Short-term versus long-term
The problem is we end up thinking short-term rather than long-term. Drastic immediate action rather small incremental changes. A quick fix now rather than investing in something that lasts. By thinking short-term we are setting ourselves up for failure. We are setting ourselves up, to get punched in the face.
To get immediate results we take drastic action. We try drastic diets. The cabbage soup diet. The maple syrup diet. The clay diet. Drastic action to get immediate big results. It takes a lot of energy and motivation to do these diets. That’s why they don’t last. We can’t sustain that amount of motivation indefinitely. We lose some weight then give up. We go back to our old ways. It’s easier.
The same in martial arts, in sparring. We try to finish the fight quickly. We will throw everything we have in the first round. Throw all the punches and kicks we can. It takes a high amount of motivation. It takes a lot of energy. We can’t sustain it. After the first round, we are spent. We are easy pickings for our opponent. We tried to finish the fight quickly. Quickly we were finished in the fight.
Instead of doing repeated crash diets, we need a lifestyle change. We need to make one small change at a time. What if you ate one extra portion of vegetables a day. What if you made a home cooked meal instead of a ready meal. Also, sometimes it’s not what you put in, it’s what you take out. What if you reduced your alcohol intake. What if you drank one glass less of coke a day. Small changes over a long period can accumulate and create dramatic results.
Instead of trying to finish the fight quickly, what if we took our time. If our opponent came in ‘all guns blazing’, we could weather the storm. We could wait. We could bide our time. We could use just enough energy and effort to defend ourselves. Once they had used up all their energy, we could strike. We could finish the fight. Finish it in round 4 rather than round 1.
Winning is losing and losing is winning
Metaphorically, getting punched in the mouth is like losing in life. It’s a failure. Nobody likes to lose. We all like to win. But when we win, do we learn anything?
If we keep winning then we get a fixed mindset. That we have it all sorted. We have the perfect strategy. We have the perfect plan. So we do not need to improve. We do not need to learn anything new. We are perfect.
When we get punched in the mouth, we lose. But the loss allows us to reflect on what we could do better. It is a lesson. It makes us think, what we did wrong. It encourages us to change direction. To do something differently. Otherwise the same will happen again. Pain is a great teacher, but nobody likes the lessons.
If we are learning the lessons. If we are growing and developing. If we continue to improve. Are we not winning?
Does the experience of loss allow us to secretly win behind the scenes?
Does the experience of winning mean we are losing because we are not learning and improving.
Takeaways
Life is hard, because we don’t plan for failure. When it happens, it is difficult to take. Because we believe that things will be perfect. What if we had a plan for own next possible failure. There is a saying that ‘failure to plan, is planning for failure’. What if instead, we had the saying that ‘if we plan for failure, when we fail, we have a plan’.
Life is hard, because we think short-term instead of long-term. We take drastic, high effort action to get immediate results. We can’t sustain it. We should look for small easy changes. Changes we can live with. Changes that require little energy, effort or motivation. Changes that will produce small but lasting results.
Life is hard, because we don’t like losing. We think a punch in the face is a loss. But that loss can allow is to reflect. To change direction. To improve. Winning all the time allows little opportunity to reflect. No need to change direction. No opportunity to improve. We should embrace the losses as opportunities to improve. If we are improving, we are winning.
Every now and then life is going to punch you in the mouth. What are you going to do? Are you going to give in to fear, give in to doubt and just give up? Or are you going to get back on the horse and keep moving forward?
Life is not perfect and neither are we. Life is not going to go the way we plan. We just have to do the best we can, with what we have and the time we have to do it in.
What are you going to do when you next get punched in the mouth?
Footnotes
I have seen this idea of planning for failure from an article by Steve Kamb from Nerd Fitness
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