What Getting Punched In The Face Taught Me

By Sam Yang - Get similar updates here

Getting punched in the face is rather unpleasant. You should avoid it if at all possible. If you however have gotten punched in the face, or train in a sport or art where you're constantly getting punched in the face, get the most out of it. There's valuable life lessons there and it would be truly said if all you got from the experience was a black eye.

Conflict management

Getting punched is really an education in conflict. As a wise dramatist once told me, "conflict is drama, action is character." From a martial arts perspective, life is conflict and your actions define your character. A martial artist truly believes that: you can think however you want about yourself, write your memoir however you want, have all the best intentions in the world, but your actions are the lasting evidence of your character. Then a punch serves as a perfect metaphor for life, and the techniques the martial artist uses as ideological symbols of what we can use in real life as a way to manage conflict. If you were to look into the origins of all of our human conflicts, they all stem from the first time a human got into a physical fight with another human. This was pre-language after all. Then no matter how emotional and complex an argument or conflict becomes, it still functions under the same rules of a physical fight. Now in the civilized world we don't rely on physical domination, rather we financially dominate. Same struggle, different day.

Martial arts is about choices, best choices. It's to train you to make the best choice in a given urgent situation where you take the least amount of damage, but at the same time give yourself an opportunity to create your own action (e.g. escape) or counter-offensive (e.g. strike back).

Ways people react to a punch:

1. You can cower - You get to the checkout of your supermarket and there's a long line. You blame the world. You say to yourself, "of course there's a line. This always happens to me. My life sucks." You're the protagonist who's always getting kicked around in the movie in your head about yourself. You're still the main character, but the movie is all about the ways you suffer. You've mentally turned a long line in the supermarket into Doctor Zhivago. You look at your cart and you have less items than a lot of the other people, why aren't they going out of their way to let you go ahead of them? The cruelty of it all. A minor fleeting annoyance has become the worst possible thing that could have ever happen to you. You can smell your kale rotting in your cart.

In the UFC, the president Dana White has explicitly said he doesn't care if a fighters wins or loses as long as he puts on a fight and gives it all he's got. The fighters who try to win all the way to the last moment, even in a losing effort, are still brought back. The fighters who mentally break down and cower and wait for the referee to save them and stop the fight are released from the company. It's a fight, don't expect mercy. Once they feel their opponent wilt, they turn up the intensity and attack more and more ferociously. Some people can't finish what they start and some people are amazing finishers. Cowering doesn't lessen damage, it only increases it. Worst of all worlds. Sometimes people with inferior technique will win if they have more of a will to fight. A person who knows every martial art who doesn't have the will to fight makes a much easier victim than a person who knows nothing but will fight with every inch of their being. Forget about intent, your actions define your character.

2. You can drop your head, grit your teeth, brace, and return your own punch - You're given directions to a job site. You wait around for thirty minutes and it doesn't take you very long to realize you're at the wrong place. You don't call your boss to check in or to see if there's a mistake. You wait for your boss to call since it's his mistake and you want to let him know it's he who messed up. You want this to be an example of you being right. Your boss calls, he's understandably upset that you're not at the job site. You tell your boss where you are, your boss suddenly realizes he gave you the wrong address. He apologizes for his mistake but is still upset that when you realized the error about the address, you didn't take responsibility to correct the situation. You feel like, how dare your boss be upset at you. He's not allowed to be upset, it's you who should be upset because you're the one who waited around, and he's the one to blame for all this mess. It becomes just another example of your boss trying to pass the blame onto his employees and you're keeping track in your mental ledger.

Even in a professional fight, you'll have fighters who take a punch to give a punch. How dare he punch me? I'll show him! Do you want to be right, or do you want to get the job done? It may be more advantageous to move up in the company if you're easy to work with and you're the guy who can get the job done even when the situation isn't perfect. It's the question amateur fighters need to ask themselves if they want to get to the top, do you want to prove how tough you are, or do you want to win the fight? Do you want to prove you're stronger than your opponent by taking a punch and giving a harder punch, or do you want to smart and walk away with the winner's purse and maintain a long career? It's what separates the best from the tough guys. It's smart to be hard, but hard to be smart.

3. You can block - You graduate college with engineering and start your first job at a startup. You don't know much about business but you remember your high school economics teacher telling you once you get a job, to always keep at least three months worth of savings in the bank. That sticks with you. You want to spend like your other friends, buy things you've been meaning to, upgrade your car but the words of your econ teacher lingers. You live conservatively and are able to save four months worth of rent. Like many startups, your company goes under. Since everyone was basically a new hire, all your coworkers panic. You've been able to shield yourself from the full force of the damage. You look for another job, interview, but you don't have the desperation of some of your coworkers. You also have the luxury of not having to take the first job offered. With time, a strong resume, leveraging your network, and some luck, you procure yourself a new job that was better than before. This time you promise yourself to save six months rent.

4. You can intercept, crash, parry, or deflect - You're a long time photographer, a pure artist. You hear about digital cameras and Photoshop. You can listen to your ego and be a "pure artist" and remain "true to your craft", whatever that means, or you can be a working photographer. Do you want to be stuck up and prove film is "higher culture" or do you want to remain a photographer? Your clients don't really care, they just want the best image possible. You early adopt digital media and position yourself to be the most sought after person in photography when digital takes over the whole medium. You intercepted a situation early on before it got beyond your control, and instead of fighting its power, you used its power to your advantage. Instead of being creatively stifled, the new medium has opened you up to an infinite amount of artistic possibilities. You just had to open your mind first.

5. You can slip, bob, weave, duck, or just plain move out of the way - You're at the supermarket and there's a long line. It doesn't bother you. You knew living in a big city meant more people, more cars, and longer lines. It's a popular market with good produce and it's worth the wait. It's par for the course of living the life you choose to life. You're in the moment and not sulking, you're aware, mindful, and not living in your head. When another cashier opens up, you're the quickest to react. In your good mood, you allow an elderly customer who's been waiting much longer than you have to proceed in front of you. You're smart and a good person.

What you should walk away with

Instead of denying the punch, you accept that the punch is coming, roll with it, and avoid damage. This is the situation, this is the severity of the conflict, you can't control all the variables but you can control your own reactions to it. Philosophically this will be hard to master, but the idea is, things can only damage you if you allow it to. You can't avoid all the punches, or all the bad things in your life, but you can still find meaning and purpose. You control that. Once you find meaning you can be happy even when you're sad.

Part of the paralysis of conflict is, you're not sure what to do. You feel like there's an infinite amount of choices, which feels the same as having no choices. If you think of it as you would a physical thing, you soon realize there are only a limited amount of options that are worth pursuing. There may be an infinite amount of ways to punch, but only a few of them are effective, the rest aren't worth worrying about. Don't focus your time and energy on all possibilities, only the on the possibilities that are significant. A master of strategy doesn't think about all possibilities because she understand they aren't all equivalent. Thinking they are is the first strategic mistake. Focus only on the few things that matter.

What I've learned from martial arts is, there's are only so many limbs we can use to attack, and only so many ways we can use them. It only takes so long to learn these elements. The rest of martial arts then is to find philosophical applications to these physical techniques. That's the long journey.

A punch after all is just a metaphor for objective reality trying to knock your head off.
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Sam Yang from an early age has been obsessed with connecting the dots between martial arts and efficiency, health, mindset, business, science, and habits to improve optimal well-being. For more info, join his newsletter. You can also connect to All Out Effort on Facebook and Twitter.

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