In the words of Miyamoto ‘Practice and understand the realization that

by knowing one way, you know a thousand’. Miyamoto dedicated his life to mastering the

sword. When he was younger, he trained from dusk till dawn recklessly and pushed his boundaries

further and further. In fact, he left his home village when he was 15 or 16, to travel the

country and learn from the best masters, and to challenge any fighter that had a reputation for

dueling. A quest that would amazingly never see him fall short and lose. Miyamoto feared none,

his aspirations were comparable to none, and thanks to his irreproachable reckless training,

his skills became second to none. His method would be recognized and feared,

and even though Miyamoto learned just one art, he knew how to express it in thousands of ways.

We currently live in a world in which we are showered by countless possibilities and

opportunities. Something that we should value and acknowledge. And so, one might think that sooner

or later, everyone finds the right opportunity that is aligned with one’s own aspirations,

and that eventually, everyone becomes fulfilled. But reality is rarely so straightforward. Indeed,

those many possibilities can often give birth to even bigger anxieties, so often in fact that

there is even a term for it - Decision Paralysis. It’s like when you enter a self-service buffet,

you have the right to put whatever you want on your plate, and at the beginning your enthusiasm

is immeasurable. But the more you consider what’s in the buffet, the more anxious you

become. Indeed, many delicious dishes might be laid out for you, but the human stomach

is only so big... So you serve yourself a bit of this, and you take a little bit of that,

all to have one big messy plate at the end that you can’t even finish, let alone taste

it properly with it all mixing together as you eat. In your attempt not to miss out on anything,

everything becomes a confusing, unpalatable mess and you’re left staring at an empty plate.

And that is exactly what’s happening in the world right now; people are often disoriented in the

face of the many opportunities they encounter, unable to filter them and focus on just one.

Many people also think they can be good at everything, so they jump from one skill to

the next, but since they lack the patience and focus to reach a level of deep understanding,

they end up abandoning that opportunity altogether. And so they get depressed, wondering

why they never reached the level they intended, decide that’s just the way of things, move on to

the next activity, and so the cycle begins again. So what we can learn from this is that when you

try different fields, and different opportunities without really getting deep into them and giving

yourself the time to grasp them, you can never truly gain the full benefit from them. Your

mission to find the path where you’ll feel fulfilled will always be in restart mode.

Like Miyamoto, we need to give ourselves time to truly grasp what’s in our hands and filter

any noise that’s outside of it, regardless of how tempting it can be. Like Miyamoto,

we should not feel content by knowing just the superficial aspect of a discipline when the

beauty of it is ingrained inside. Like Miyamoto, we should dedicate our time to one skill, and make

thousands of ways out of it. Of course, you can then move to another skill, like Miyamoto did when

he moved to writing and philosophizing, but not before fully grasping the skill at-hand first.