Worthy opponents

Without the aid of a worthy opponent, who's not really an enemy but a thoroughly dedicated adversary, the apprentice has no possibility of continuing on the path of knowledge.
~ Carlos Castaneda Tales of Power

There is another reason to love our enemies: They force us to become smarter. The riddles they thrust in front of us sharpen our wits and sculpt our souls
~ Rob Brezsny Pronoia


Last year, apart from starting Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, I also started learning Kali (Phillipino stick fighting, also known as escrima or arnis de mano, a martial art possibly related in the distant past to the silat of Indonesia and Malaysia.) Whereas BJJ is empty hand and mostly horizontal, Kali uses weapons (sticks and knives) and is mostly vertical.

One of the key things we do in Kali is sparring, and what I have found is that I learn more from sparring with a superior opponent than with someone I am more evenly matched with. When you have what Castaneda calls "a worthy opponent", you have to stay in the moment and fully alert, you know when you get hit, so you get more experience in learning to evade a serious attack and you learn from watching your opponent what worked when they attacked you, so you can see whether the same approach may work with another opponent. As a result your skill grows: in effect your opponent becomes the whetstone against whom you sharpen your edge.

And while this is a clear lesson in martial arts and in competitive sports and games, it is also true of learning in general. If you are able to just phone in your performance then you tend to become complacent. But when the result is in doubt, you have to stay focused in order to have any hope of victory.

Often your "worthy opponent" is your personal best. For example, if you have previously been able to bench a particular weight at the gym, then if you add 5 kg to that weight, it may become a more worthy opponent and it is the "struggle" against that opponent that increases your strength. If you are learning a language then if you set yourself a target of learning 10 new words a day when previously you have only managed to learn 5 new words a day then you have to find new strategies in order to succeed against this more worthy opponent, and thus become a more effective learner.

The flip side of this is making sure that you are yourself a worthy opponent: you must compete hard enough so that your opponent has the opportunity to learn from you. If you go too easy, your opponent may acquire habits and patterns that will fail against a stronger opponent or in a life-or-death situation. Instead, you must give them the opportunity to test for themselves what works and what doesn't. Unless your opponent has the opportunity to fail, they can't have the opportunity to honestly succeed.

While the examples I have given above have mainly regarded competing, they also apply in other contexts. For example, if you learn a partner dance such as salsa or modern jive, the women are often told to follow what their partner leads, not what their partner intended to lead. This is the only way that a guy can learn what works and what doesn't in leading a woman in particular moves on the dance floor; it is only by trying and not getting the result they expected that they can modify what they are doing until they succeed. In this case, even though the situation is one of cooperation, the woman can still act as a "worthy opponent".

The two take ways lessons here are:

• always seek a worthy opponent if you want to improve since a worthy opponent acts as a mirror of your faults and weaknesses and makes it clearer what you need to work on.
• seek to be a worthy opponent for others so that you help them to build their skills in turn.