Tag: mastery

What Mozart Told the 21 Year Old

Temple TeamMindset & Philosophy

Hello Wah Lum Family,

There are two ways to climb a mountain.

You can start at the bottom and make every single mistake from scratch on your way to the top. Or, you can take a Sherpa with you and master the best of what others have already figured out.

We often hear that “mistakes are the best teachers.”

I don’t know about that.

Your mistakes aren’t the best teacher; they are just the most expensive. The successful learn by example; they learn from the experience of their Sifu and their seniors. The foolish insist on firsthand pain.

However, there is a trap here.

While you need a guide, you cannot rely solely on asking for directions. Advice is overrated, and action is underrated.

There is a story about Mozart that perfectly illustrates this point:

A young man asked Mozart how to write a symphony. Mozart replied, “You’re far too young to write a symphony.” The young man protested, “But you were writing symphonies when you were 10 years old, and I’m 21!”

Mozart smiled and replied, “Yes, but I didn’t go around asking people how to do it.”

You can read all the books, watch all the videos, and ask your Sifu every question in the book. But ultimately, advice-gathering can quickly become procrastination in disguise.

The Balance:

  1. Trust the Sherpa: Don’t try to reinvent the system. It has been refined for longer than you’ve been alive so you don’t have to make the “expensive mistakes.”
  2. Be like Mozart: Don’t just ask how to be good. Go train.

Take the advice, act on it, and adjust accordingly.

See you in training,

Sifu Oscar

 

P.S. There are 2 ways I can help you stop “advice gathering” and start taking action:

  1. See it for yourself: The best way to understand the system is to see it in person. Email us kungfu@wahlum.com with Observation, and we will set up a time for you to come visit a class.
  2. Start right now: Reading about Kung Fu or fitness won’t change your life; doing it will. Don’t wait until you know “how” to write the symphony. Just start playing the notes. Our Foundations program is the perfect place to start.
    Click here to stop researching and start training.

Control Corner 25 from Sifu Oscar: The Mirror of Mastery

Oscar AgramonteControl Corner, Mindset & Philosophy

At Wah Lum, the flipped Chinese character for ‘Fire’ reminds us that control is the key to mastering life’s challenges. Welcome to the Control Corner, where we share weekly wisdom to help you unlock your potential.

Essentials: Mastery begins with self-awareness. In West with the Night, author Beryl Markham reflects on how we spend our lives studying others while often remaining strangers to ourselves. As a pilot, alone in the vast night sky, she discovered the power of self-observation—an essential skill in both life and martial arts.

Why It Matters: True progress isn’t just about watching and learning from others; it’s about turning that focus inward. In martial arts, we often want to rush to advanced techniques, but true skill comes from refining the basics with patience and awareness. Just as Markham had to master small skills before flying solo, every stance, every movement, every breath is an opportunity for deeper understanding.

What’s Next: This week, be your own observer. Set aside time to train alone, focusing on the fundamentals with fresh eyes. What do you discover when you’re fully present with yourself? Mastery isn’t just about learning more—it’s about seeing more in what you already know.

Here is a small excerpt from the book West with the Night by Beryl Markham that inspired this post. 

“You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself. You learn to watch other people, but you never watch yourself because you strive against loneliness. 

If you read a book, or shuffle a deck of cards, or care for a dog, you are avoiding yourself. The abhorrence of loneliness is as natural as wanting to live at all. If it were otherwise, men would never have bothered to make an alphabet, not to have fashioned words out of what were only animal sounds, not to have crossed continents – each man to see what the other looked like. 

Being alone in an aeroplane for even so short a time as a night and a day, irrevocably alone, with nothing to observe but your instruments and your own hands in semi-darkness, nothing to contemplate but the size of your small courage, nothing to wonder about but the beliefs, the faces, and the hopes rooted in your mind – such an experience can be as startling as the first awareness of a stranger walking by your side at night. You are the stranger.”