Useless vs Unuseful

(recently posted on Facebook by Mr. Rich Hale)

Several of our senior Kenpoists are known for their intellectual approach to our art. One of these guys is Dennis Conatser, who's fond of saying, "You don't know what you don't know."

What this means to me is when we enter a new realm of learning, we'll come across many things we've never imagined or thought about, so we won't even know the questions, let alone the answers.

A good example is when I first started in Jiu-Jitsu. While kneeling in front of my instructor, he put one hand on my knee and one hand on my opposite shoulder, then swept me down to the mat. Thinking I knew this technique, I tried it on one of the other white belts. Well, I didn't know that, done incorrectly, that action could cause your opponent to bend forward, so as I successfully swept my opponent to the mat, I also successfully swept his forehead into my face. I simply didn't know that could happen. Thereby, I didn't know what I didn't know.

To this end, Mr. Parker missed his opportunity to fix everything in Kenpo, because if he'd only asked me at orange belt, I could have fixed everything!

Seriously, the real problem with not knowing what we don't know occurs after we get our black belts and mistakenly think we're experts in karate. Before then, we generally have someone ahead of us who keeps us on course, but when we get our black belts and open our own school - we're the boss, we're in charge, and everyone listens to us. No matter how stupid we are.

When we have our own schools and we get to decide what's right and wrong, we make our biggest mistakes. We determine which techniques are good or bad, and we choose to teach katas or not.

Yes, we can all look back and recognize times we were mistaken and made a wrong decision. That's not the problem; it's our unwillingness to go back and correct mistakes that could lead to our lack of progress.

Let's say, on the way up, we learned a technique that seemed to have no practical value, so when we opened our own school, we deleted it from our curriculum. Later, we discovered this technique contained movements that developed several inherent weaknesses in our overall physicality. How do we reintroduce this technique back into our system?

When we removed this technique, we thought we were evolving and shedding unnecessary techniques, but as we personally grow and our overall knowledge of the martial arts improves, we must be able to go back and correct mistakes we've made simply because we didn't know what we didn't know. This may sometimes leave us wishing we'd never deleted something from the system in the first place.

Don't get me wrong. There are several techniques from the classic Ed Parker curriculum that I either don't teach or don't spend much time on. Yet, there isn't a single technique that I have thrown out entirely.

Mr. Parker's Encyclopedia of Kenpo contains around a thousand terms. Most are easily understood, but the terms "useful" and "useless" take more consideration. Useful is straightforwardly defined as "Any logical or practical move that can be effectively used."

On the other hand, Useless is more complex, defined as "Not the same as Unuseful. These are moves that are not effective under any condition."

This leaves us with the term "Unuseful," which is not explicitly defined in the Encyclopedia of Kenpo but is referred to in Mr. Parker's Zen of Kenpo, under the term "Usefulness," where Mr. Parker says to categorize your moves as useful, unuseful, or useless. Then cautions us never to discard knowledge that is not applicable to us but to store it.