One thing I’ve noticed after going back to Judo: there’s a tendency for seniors to over-explain throw variations + counters + combinations. I guess when you love a sport so much, you can’t help but share everything on a technique.
But I don’t think it’s pedagogically effective.
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I’ve been thinking a lot about this because there are parallels to a lot of other things in life.
You often can’t learn a high-level combination until you master the fundamentals. The meta skill involved here is breaking the skill into smaller sub-skills in your head.
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Your brain can’t handle an information dump without internalising lower level skills.
When I reflect on my Judo, I realise that so much of my knowledge builds on a deep understanding of a single throw. (This is called a ‘tokuiwaza’, or favourite technique.)
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The tokuiwaza is the core of Japanese Judo instruction. You’re expected to pick one at yellow belt. After you master that one technique, and after you are able to use it to win in competition, you begin layering on additional throws, combinations, setups, etc.
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Eventually, your entire knowledge of the sport is built like a tree from that one technique.
This is so widely known that Judo teachers often describe the learning experience as 'before tokuiwaza' and 'after tokuiwaza'. The experience of Judo is fundamentally different at both.
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The beauty of this approach is that it really teaches you how to self-learn. There is no set curriculum in Judo. (Well, there is one for belt upgrades, but not for competition).
After tokuiwaza, you naturally gravitate to some throws and not others.
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This eventually becomes your unique play style. And competition (or randori, free-form sparring) is the crucible in which you turn it into an effective one.
This has lots of analogues in just about every other skill tree I've experienced.
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For instance, I've noticed that marketers tend to master one domain first, before branching out to others. Like Andy Baldacci (startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episo) who started with email onboarding, and then eventually branched out to every other aspect of growth marketing.
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When you're mastering a sub-section, you can feel free to ignore the other aspects of marketing. When I was mastering my tokuiwaza, for instance, I ignored pretty much every other throw in the Judo canon.
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It's not that the others weren't useful; it was that I couldn't use them as well without mastering one throw first. The deep principles you internalise from mastering one throw turns out to be transferrable to nearly every other throw.
I suspect that's similar with other skills.
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How I'm applying it to marketing: I've spent 2 years getting good at content marketing. I'm probably 'ok'. I'm currently layering on SEO and conversion sub-skills, and email-marketing, which is a simple variant.
But I'm ignoring everything else.
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Did the same thing when I was learning to code. Master one domain (webdev), and then extend out from that to everything else. The ideas in webdev turn out to appear in lots of other places.
So: what skill trees are you current climbing, and where are you starting within them?
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Analogous to product market fit? 🤔
Where the experience is marked different before and after it occurs?
Perhaps a practitioner-tokuiwaza-fit
PS: i think I finally nail the spelling of tokuiwaza 😆
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dang, i really wanna take up judo again (did it for a few months in JC, and managed to learn ogoshi). i have a judo place right next to my house!
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I was going to say “go for it!” But the truth is that I’m taking it really easy with Judo right now. Problem with it is that it’s really for younger people — contact sports are scary if you’re old!
I think maybe this is why so many people do BJJ instead 🤔
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