Yesterday i came across this brilliant article entitled "Success In Dancing". At a glance, you might think it's an article about dancing, full with dancing tips and patterns and shines whatsover. Nope. When you actually look at it, there's none of those dancing tips or any shiet like that, but rather it's more of an article that tells you to take your time. And it's applicable not just to dancing or martial arts, but to almost anything else that we want to learn and master.
Quoting the article .. "To give yourself time is to actively work toward a goal without setting a limit on how long you will work."
Reading this article, I remembered when my instructor asked us (a group of us at that time, around 2 months into my dancing classes) this question : "how much time are you giving yourself to be a good dancer?".
Some of them answered "in 3 months", "half a year", "1 year", etc etc..
My answer was, and still is, "no time limit".
And I realized how true the article was. Although I adopted that giving-yourself-time principle without realizing, the effectiveness is unquestionable. Personally, the reason why I didn't set a time limit was because of the disappointment I had time and again with time limits. I used to set time limits on myself to be good at something, to reach certain goals etc etc. But experiences has taught me that the whole learning experience would be a more enriching and fulfilling one, if there was no time limit at all.
By not giving myself a time limit, I have a lifetime to slowly learn, digest and enjoy the process, and not worrying about how other people is overtaking me, how other people is learning faster than me, how i'm losing out and all those bullshit that will actually slow us down (trust me, it does).
I find the article very helpful in relating to my own experiences, and I hope it would help some of you in one way or another. Life would be better without unnecessary worry and stress, and although it's difficult to totally eradicate them, learning how to identify and manage some of them (like the one in the article) will definitely help.
