Every Story Has a Point of View.
So Do You.

When my partner in Tokyo and I first started trying to build a business helping martial-arts schools, I thought we had one enormous advantage.

We were martial artists.

Not tourists.

Not generic business consultants who had never bowed onto a mat.

We had spent years, decades even, inside dojos.

We knew what good instruction felt like.

We knew what bad instruction felt like.

We knew what it was like to walk into a school and feel welcomed, and we knew what it was like to feel invisible.

We had seen schools with strong cultures and schools with problems everybody seemed to accept because that was just how the dojo worked.

We understood students.

We understood some of what instructors deal with.

We had opinions about:

• onboarding;
• retention;
• communication;
• culture;
• teaching;
• belonging;
• follow-up;
• the student experience.

And because we had been martial artists for years, many of those opinions did not feel like opinions.

They felt like knowledge.

That turned out to be part of the problem.

The problem was not that we knew nothing. The problem was that we mistook one kind of experience for the whole picture.

I knew the dojo from the mat.

I did not yet know it from the owner’s chair.

I Thought I Knew the Problem

From a student’s perspective, some dojo problems look almost embarrassingly obvious.

• Why didn’t anybody follow up with that trial student?
• Why doesn’t the instructor know why this student stopped coming?
• Why is onboarding so inconsistent?
• Why does one student feel like part of the family while another one quietly disappears?

Why doesn’t the school simply:

• fix the website;
• clean up the communication;
• build a better system;
• send the follow-up;
• make the experience more welcoming?

Standing on the student side of the counter, those questions can feel simple.

The answers seem clear.

Just do the thing.

Then I started talking more seriously with owners.

And I began seeing everything that had been invisible from my position.

The owner might also be:

• the head instructor;
• the salesperson;
• the person answering messages at midnight;
• the person paying rent;
• the person worrying about payroll;
• the person teaching the kids’ class;
• the person managing the parents;
• the person dealing with injuries;
• the person cleaning the academy;
• the person thinking about retention;
• the person trying to have a marriage and a life after everybody else goes home.

Something that looked like:

“Why don’t they just do this?”

From my side looked very different from theirs.

That did not automatically mean the owner was right.

And it did not automatically mean the student perspective was wrong.

It meant I had been looking at part of the system and assuming I was looking at the whole system.

Experience Is Always From Somewhere

That realization was uncomfortable because experience feels authoritative.

And sometimes it should be.

If you have trained martial arts for decades, you know things somebody who has never trained does not know.

If you have worked construction for thirty years, you know things somebody who has only read construction-management books does not know.

Experience matters.

But experience always happens from somewhere.

An apprentice sees the job differently from the foreman.

The foreman sees it differently from the superintendent.

The superintendent sees it differently from the general contractor.

The general contractor sees it differently from the owner paying for the building.

They may all be standing on the same project.

They are not standing in the same position.

The mistake is not having a perspective. You cannot avoid that. The mistake is forgetting you have one.

Fiction Has Been Training Us to Do This

This is one reason fiction matters to me.

A good story lets us move into another person’s position.

We do not merely hear what they did.

We get a chance to understand what the world looked like from where they were standing.

Orson Scott Card plays with this powerfully in Ender’s Game.​

One of Ender’s unusual strengths is his ability to understand an opponent.

He does not only ask:

He tries to reconstruct:

• what the other person sees;
• what they expect;
• what they fear;
• what they believe he will do;
• what they believe he believes about them.

That kind of perspective-taking makes him extraordinarily effective.

It also creates a moral problem.

Because understanding another person can become empathy.

Or it can become a weapon.

If I understand what you fear, I may be able to help you.

I may also be able to manipulate you.

So the leadership lesson I take from fiction is not:

Understand people so you can defeat them.

It is:

Understand another person’s position deeply enough that your judgment includes their reality instead of only your interpretation of it.

If I can only explain why I am right, I understand one side of the problem.

If I can explain why an intelligent person standing where you stand would see it differently, now I may actually understand more of the problem.

My Theories Were Still Theories

This was the harder lesson for me in the business.

My partner and I had theories.

Many of them were thoughtful.

Many came from years of genuine experience.

Some may have been right.

Some may still prove right.

But they were still theories until they survived contact with the people actually living the problem from the ownership side.

That distinction changed the way I approached gym owners.

Instead of entering the conversation thinking:

“I know what your problem is.”

I began trying to understand:

• What problem are you actually trying to solve?
• What does that look like in your school?
• When did you first notice it?
• What happens next?
• Who makes sure that happens?
• What have you already tried?
• What am I missing because I have never sat in your chair?

That is a very different conversation.

One begins with my answer. The other begins with their reality.

The Hard Decision to Start Over

Eventually I had to make a harder decision.

The first version of the business was not something I wanted to keep defending simply because we had invested time and belief into it.

I dissolved that iteration and the partnership.

That decision carried mixed feelings.

Part of me regrets that I am doing this solo now.

There are things about building something with another person that I miss.

There is energy in having somebody alongside you.

Shared discovery.

Shared frustration.

Someone else who understands what you are trying to build without needing the entire backstory every time.

I do not want to pretend losing that was automatically a gift.

But I am also grateful for what the change forced me to do.

I had to stop relying on the confidence of:

“We understand martial-arts schools.”

and replace it with something more demanding:

“Let’s find out.”

That has changed the business.

More importantly, it has changed me.

From Knowing to Learning

There is a subtle danger in competence.

The more you know, the easier it becomes to stop asking questions.

You have seen this before.

You understand the pattern.

You recognize the problem.

You have an answer.

And sometimes you are right.

But competence can quietly turn experience into certainty.

Certainty can turn questions into explanations.

And once I am explaining before I understand, I am no longer learning from the person in front of me.

I am fitting them into the model I already brought with me.

The shift I am making now is simple:

EXPERIENCE → THEORY → QUESTION → EVIDENCE → UPDATED MODEL → TEST

Experience gives me somewhere to begin.

It does not give me permission to skip the rest.

Experience is the starting line.

It is not the finish.

Same Dojo. Different Story.

Consider one struggling student.

From the student’s perspective:

“Nobody notices whether I am improving.”

From the instructor’s perspective:

“I have thirty people on the mat and I am doing my best to help everybody.”

From the owner’s perspective:

“I am teaching six classes today, answering leads, dealing with rent, two parents want to talk to me, one instructor called out, and I am worried three students are about to quit.”

Which story is true?

Potentially all three.

The student may genuinely be disappearing.

The instructor may genuinely care.

The owner may genuinely be overloaded.

Understanding the owner’s perspective does not erase the student’s problem.

Understanding the student does not make the owner lazy.

Understanding the instructor does not mean the system is working.

Perspective does not remove the problem. It helps us locate it.

And once we locate it, we have a better chance of solving the right one.

The Point Is Not to Agree

This is where perspective-taking sometimes gets misunderstood.

Understanding somebody’s position does not mean surrendering your judgment.

I can reconstruct your reasoning and still think you are wrong.

I can understand why an owner made a decision and still believe the decision is hurting students.

I can understand a student’s frustration and still believe the student is missing part of the picture.

I can understand my old business theories and still decide they needed to be tested rather than defended.

The goal is not agreement. The goal is a more complete map.

If I can only explain why I am right, I understand one side of the problem.

If I can explain why an intelligent person standing where you stand would see it differently, now I may actually be getting somewhere.

⚔ The Dojo Drill

Think of a disagreement, business problem, family tension, or relationship where you are fairly certain you understand what is happening.

First, write your version.

• What happened?
• What matters?
• What should happen next?

Then move positions.

Write the other person’s version without making them:

• stupid;
• evil;
• lazy;
• irrational;
• weak.

Try to produce a version they would actually recognize.

Then ask:

1. What facts are they noticing that I may be discounting?
2. What costs do they experience that I do not?
3. What constraints exist from their position that are invisible from mine?
4. What am I seeing that they may not see?
5. Where are we interpreting the same evidence differently?
6. What evidence could change my model?
7. What evidence could change theirs?

Then ask the hardest question:

“What am I calling knowledge that is really only knowledge from my position?”

Keep Your Perspective. Lose the Certainty.

I still believe years of martial arts gave me something valuable when I started the business.

I understand students in a way somebody who has never trained probably does not.

I have lived inside martial-arts culture for decades.

That matters.

But what I know now is that perspective has edges.

There are things you cannot see from your position.

Sometimes you need another person.

Sometimes you need a customer.

Sometimes you need an owner.

Sometimes you need the person who disagrees with you.

Sometimes fiction lets you borrow another person’s eyes for a few hundred pages.

And sometimes reality does the same thing by making your theory fail.

There are things I regret losing when that first iteration ended.

And there are things I’m grateful I was forced to learn afterward.

Both can be true.

What I do not regret is learning the difference between having an answer and having an understanding.

I knew the dojo from the mat.

Now I am trying to learn it from the owner’s chair.

And every owner I talk with reminds me that there is still more of the story I cannot see from where I am standing.

Maybe that is the real discipline.

Not giving up your perspective.

Not pretending every interpretation is equally true.

Just remembering:

Every story has a point of view. So do you.

And before you become too certain that you understand the whole thing, ask:

“What part of this story can only be seen from where the other person is standing?”

📚 Leader’s Library

​A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens​

Why?

Dickens begins by describing a world filled with contradictions:

• Wisdom and foolishness
• Belief and disbelief
• Light and darkness
• Hope and despair

He was writing about the turmoil surrounding the French Revolution, but that opening survives because human beings keep discovering the same truth:

An age can contain extraordinary progress and extraordinary danger simultaneously.

That is worth remembering whenever somebody tells you that everything is getting worse.

Or everything is getting better.

Usually, reality is more complicated.

It is often both.

And leadership begins with learning to see both clearly.

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