(See if you can guess what’s wrong with this real-life story.)
In 1973, I got out of the U.S. Army without a pot to pee in. I was twenty-one years old and didn’t have a marketable skill. I knocked around with a few jobs trying to find myself: maintenance man at “Kings Garden Apartments in Alexandria on route 1; mail clerk in Crystal City; laborer on a Construction site in Alexandria to name a few.
Before I got out of the Army, in Fort Belvoir, VA, I used to ride a bus from the base into D.C. twice a week to go to the “Jow Ga Kung Fu studio on sixth and H st N.W. On the bus on my way to Washington, I would pass a karate studio, (Roberts Karate in Alexandria on route one).
At the time, I was known as a “Ronin” in martial arts terms a masterless Samaria. I felt that martial arts was my destiny, but I couldn’t find the style that gave me what I was looking for. Mainly because at the time I didn’t know. I just knew that I would know when I found it, so I jumped around from style to style earning black belts as I went along.
So far, I had acquired a black belt in “Japanese Gojukai karate” under Joseph Lopez in New York, and a Black belt in “Jow Ga Kung Fu” under Sifu Dean China in Washington D.C.
As a child, I grew up fighting and had a certain addiction to it as a means of settling disputes. Both Gojukai and Kung Fu were interesting styles that had certain elements of attraction, but neither style promoted tournament participation. In fact, both systems dealt heavily with theory and hypothesis. They set up scenario after scenario of if this happens to do these routines. Which were okay but left you yearning for opportunities to satisfy your desire to wander off in the real world. How would it feel and how would I do it, much like pleasuring yourself vs experiencing sex for the very first time.
I knew, from a friend, that Roberts Karate encouraged going to open tournaments and I wanted to do them, so I quit Kung fu and joined my first Tae Kwon Do style of martial arts. I started my Tae Kwon Do experience as a green belt, because, in those days, schools did not recognize degrees from other styles. As a green belt, I entered a Tournament competition and was on my way to earning a name for myself.
After a few months at “Roberts Karate”, I earned my black belt. Not because it was easy but because I had a lot of transferable experience from the other styles.
Martial arts in those days did not have any opportunities to earn a living doing it. In fact, most instructors had full-time jobs doing other things and taught karate as a “side hustle”. Even the Master Instructor, James K. Roberts, worked on a construction site during the day and taught classes at night when he got off.
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Back then, the NEW trend was to pay cash to the grand champion winner of the tournament to maximize its participation.
In tournament competition I found myself and suddenly knew what I wanted to do with the rest of my life; I wanted to become a superstar in an industry that was just getting started. An industry where practitioners couldn’t afford to quit their day jobs and earn enough money to keep a roof over their head (Nice work 😔. Clearly, my decision-making skills needed work, but I was alone without a family and thought, “You’ll never have another chance like this in your life, GO FOR IT!”)
My First experience setting financial goals:
At twenty-one years of age, I talked Mr. Roberts into letting me live in his studio ( where he would lock me in at night). I trained all day every day, went to tournaments on the weekends, and won a few hundred dollars an event to live on. I was on my way. I purposely put myself in a “ sink or swim” situation to accomplish my goal of being able to make a living in an industry that was in its infancy. (I would grow as it grew, or go under with it.)
Here is the problem:
Martial arts had taught me goal setting and accomplishment without me knowing it. Although I was able to get what I wanted (to become a professional martial artist)out of martial arts, I did not do it consciously. There was no “action plan” or “time frame” I simply went forward on gut instinct. To this day I wonder what my life would have been like if my parents had instilled the goal-setting concept into me at an early age.
I salute all of you for taking the steps to ensure your child’s success.
MB