“If a thing is worth doing, It is worth doing badly” – GK Chesterton
When we look at the quote above, we can easily become very confused. Why would we want to do a bad job with anything? Often, we hear the opposite, “If you’re going to do it, do it well!”
What we fail to recognize, however, is that sometimes we can put too much pressure on ourselves to do a good job with things, we turn into a perfectionist, procrastinate and end up not acting or improving. An Orange Belt student once approached me and said, “Sir, I do not want to compete in the tournament. I want to improve my spinning back kick more before I compete.” (Mind you, there is no spinning back kick in the form he needed to compete with and it really isn’t a necessity at Orange Belt to have an excellent spinning back kick ready in the sparring arsenal.) His spinning back kick is ironically among the best of my students and if he attended the tournament likely would have received some medals for his merit. The tournament was worth doing, and definitely worth participating in at a less than perfect level even if medals aren’t the receipt for competing.
Other times, we may feel tired from a long day of work and not feel like going to class because our performance will not be that great, but going to class at less than 100% is much better than sitting on the couch. We may feel self-conscious of our technique deteriorating during a test and not being our best “tournament technique” the entire test, but we must temper our expectations and work on improving our technique when tired and going through the test. Mastery, after all, is having good-bad technique. That is to say that even when you are not at your best or 100% stamina your technique should look not that different from your best work. How can we accomplish this if we don’t go to train when tired or put ourselves out there to test?
At the end of the day, doing something even if it is not perfect is always better than not doing it at all. If you don’t feel like going to class, go! If you don’t feel like cleaning your house or apartment, clean one room! If you can’t honestly do a technique due to physical limitations, modify! Don’t feel the pressure to do everything at once, and don’t feel the need to be perfect. Your 100% today will be different from your 100% yesterday or tomorrow and even 50% will get you further along than 0.
