The Best Thing About Martial Arts Is You Get to Choose Your Own Path

I first stepped on a martial arts mat when I was seven or eight years old.

That was around 1972.

The school was on the upper floor of a mall. Big windows looking out on the street.

As a kid, I spent most of class staring out those windows instead of paying attention to the sensei.

It was one of those old-school traditional karate schools.

The kind where they make seven-year-old kids do push-ups on their knuckles.

Needless to say, I did not last long.

I probably cried to my mommy about how much I hated it.

Fast forward a dozen years. I am nineteen.

Barely graduated from high school. Rejected by the armed services because of asthma.

Clueless. Angry. No healthy outlet for all that energy and angst.

Thank God for Wendell Tom. He takes me to a 24-hour diner at two in the morning and introduces me to an older Japanese lady who happens to be a second-degree black belt in aikido.

Wendell tells her he thinks I need aikido.

He was right.

Naluai Sensei, who has since passed, was the main instructor of the Lokahi Ki Society.

A big, gentle, soft-spoken Hawaiian guy who also played in a Hawaiian music group called The Surfers.

He helped me channel my energy.

Calm down my anger.

He helped me see martial arts as something for healing as much as for self-defense, which was baked into aikido from the beginning by O-Sensei, ("Great Teacher") Ueshiba Morihei and his student, and my first master, Tohei Sensei.

That was the first path.

It saved my life.

The Search

When I moved to Los Angeles, I could not find an aikido dojo that felt right. So I opened the yellow pages. Do we even have those anymore?

I saw Grandmaster Bong Soo Han’s name.

I remembered it from a book I had read called Zen in the Martial Arts by Joe Hyams.

I walked into his dojang in the summer of 1987. That was the beginning of a twenty-year journey. I stayed until his death in 2007.

After that, I was lost for a while.

I needed to focus on my career and my marriage.

And I could not find a good fit. That was hard when I was comparing every school to my twenty years under a master.

I tried kali under Mark Mikita. The energy was not right for me.

I tried wing chun under Sifu Eric Oram, the guy who helped Robert Downey Jr. with his recovery. I got there when the school was under some big changes. So I left.

I tried the Inosanto Academy under Guru Dan. I loved it there. Great energy. Great people. But no sparring. And I thought to myself, what is the point? So I left.

Then I did tai chi with my wife while I took a six-month sabbatical from work. Those six months doing tai chi with her were awesome.

But I had to go back to work, and their 8 to 9:30 p.m. classes were too late for someone who wakes up at 4 a.m. So I left.

I found Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu at a Rigan Machado school. Their schedule did not work for me. So I left.

Finally, I found Meraki. I have been there almost three years now.

The Pattern I Did Not See Until Later

When I look back at that journey, I see something I could not see while I was living it.

Every art I trained in gave me something different.

And every art I left taught me something about what I actually needed.

Aikido taught me to redirect energy instead of meeting it head-on. To move with the attack instead of against it. That saved me in ways that had nothing to do with self-defense.

Hapkido taught me discipline. Structure. How to hold a standard. How to show up every day even when I did not feel like it. Grandmaster Han was old-school. You bowed. You trained. You did not complain. You learned.

Kali showed me speed and angles.

Wing chun showed me economy of motion.

The Inosanto Academy showed me what a room full of fun and relaxed A-level people looks like as compared to the A-level people at my more "serious" hapkido school.

Tai chi showed me that my wife and I could train together, that martial arts could be something we shared instead of something I did alone.

BJJ is teaching me humility. Every day. I am sixty years old getting submitted by guys half my age and twice my size. And I keep showing up because the lesson is not the submission. The lesson is showing up anyway.

Each path gave me what I needed when I needed it. And each path ended when it was time to move on.

The Three Categories

There are three broad categories of martial arts.

Nobody talks about them this way, but the pattern is there once you see it.

The hardcore 'jutsu' styles. Wing chun. Kempo. Krav maga. Kali.

These are about taking someone down quickly, effectively, and efficiently.

They assume the fight is real and the stakes are high. You do not spar in most of these systems. You drill scenarios. You practice disabling an attacker before they disable you.

The sport arts. Boxing. Tae kwon do. Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

These are about being your best as an athlete and a warrior.

You compete. You test yourself against other people at your level and above it. You win. You lose. You learn. The goal is not self-defense. The goal is mastery. The goal is becoming someone who can perform under pressure.

The softer styles. Tai chi. Aikido. Qigong.

These balance healing with effectiveness.

They develop the practitioner physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. The techniques work. But the techniques are not the point. The point is who you become while training them.

Most people think you have to pick one. That once you commit to a style, you stay there forever. That leaving is quitting.

That is wrong.

Life Is Full of Choices

Life is like martial arts.

You get to self-select what you want to do.

And even when you join something, you get to choose how much you participate.

To what level. To what intensity. To what depth.

You are not locked in. You are never locked in.

Unless you tell yourself you are.

I spent twenty years with Grandmaster Han. I loved that school. I loved that community.

But when he died, the school died with him. And I had to find something new.

I could have stayed and watched it collapse. I could have told myself that leaving would dishonor his memory.

But that would have been a lie. The honorable thing was to take what he taught me and keep training somewhere else.

Every time I left a school, I learned something.

I learned what I needed. I learned what I did not need.

I learned what worked for me and what did not.

And I got better at choosing the next thing.

The same principle applies to everything else.

Jobs. Relationships. Cities. Hobbies. Projects. Friendships.

You are allowed to choose.

You are allowed to try something and decide it does not fit.

You are allowed to leave when it is time to leave.

The mistake most people make is thinking that choosing one path means closing the door on every other path forever.

That once you commit, you are stuck.

That walking away is failure.

Walking away is data.

It is feedback.

It is you paying attention to what you actually need instead of what you thought you needed when you started.

The Thing I Learned This Week

This week I tried to turn The Daily Dojo into a structured curriculum.

Thirteen weeks. Sequential lessons. A path you had to follow from start to finish.

It blew up in my face.

Open rates dropped by half. Click rates dropped by over 90 percent.

You told me loud and clear that you did not sign up for a class.

You signed up for standalone lessons you could read and apply whether you opened yesterday’s email or not.

So I adjusted.

I went back to what works.

Standalone lessons. One idea at a time.

No prerequisites. No keeping up.

Just show up when you show up and the lesson is there.

That is the same principle. You get to choose.

And when something does not work, you get to choose again.

I could have dug in. I could have told myself that the curriculum was good and the readers just did not understand it yet.

I could have defended the idea and ignored the data.

But that would have been ego.

The data was clear. The feedback was loud.

My job is not to defend the plan. My job is to pay attention and adjust.

The Gift of Choice

The best thing about martial arts is that you get to choose your own path.

You try something. You see if it fits.

If it does, you stay. If it does not, you leave.

And you try something else.

Nobody makes you stay in a style that is not serving you.

Nobody makes you train at a school where the energy is wrong.

Nobody makes you keep showing up to something that stopped working six months ago.

You choose. Every day. Every week. Every season.

And the beauty of that choice is that it lets you build a path that is yours.

You take what you need from aikido.

You take what you need from hapkido.

You take what you need from BJJ.

And you leave the rest behind.

You do not have to take everything.

You do not have to commit to one system forever.

You just have to keep training.

That is what makes someone dangerous.

Not loyalty to a single style. Adaptability.

The ability to take the best from everywhere and leave the rest.

The same applies to your life.

Your career. Your relationships. Your projects. Your goals.

You are allowed to change your mind.

You are allowed to try something and decide it does not fit.

You are allowed to walk away when it stops serving you.

The only mistake is staying in something that stopped working because you are afraid of what leaving says about you.

Leaving says you were paying attention.

Leaving says you care enough about your growth to make a hard choice.

Leaving says you are building a path instead of following one someone else laid out for you fifty years ago.

The Invitation

If you are in something right now that does not fit, you are allowed to leave.

You do not need permission.

You do not need a dramatic reason.

You just need to be honest about what you actually need and whether this thing is giving it to you.

And if you have been avoiding trying something new because you think committing to it means committing forever, you are wrong.

Trying something does not lock you in. It just gives you data.

And data is how you build a path worth walking.

I have trained in eight different martial arts over five decades.

Some for twenty years. Some for six months.

All of them taught me something. None of them were a waste.

And the path I am on now is better because I tried all of them.

Your path works the same way.

Try things.

Pay attention.

Keep what works.

Leave what does not.

Build a life that is yours instead of one someone else told you to want.

That is the gift.

You get to choose.

⚔ The Dojo Drill

Today’s training:

The Failure Reframe

Write down your last failure.

Then answer:

• What did I learn?
• How does this make me stronger?

📚 Leader’s Library

Book I recommend this week:

​​Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card​​

Why?

To find out how even the smallest weakest little kid can become the greatest leader and the most badass fighter in all the world.

P.S. Know a martial arts gym owner who’s stressed about money or student numbers?

Do them a favor: send them to The Leader's Dōjō, my website where I help owners get more students and keep them longer with simple systems.

One forward from you could change their gym: The Leader's Dōjō​

Chuck