Another concept for stages of mastery.
Shu-ha-ri goes back to perhaps the 10th Century in Japan, starting with the tea ceremony and spreading to other arts. (wikipedia)
1. Follow (the rules, teachings)
2. Break (the accepted conventions)
3. Detach (be creative, change the game)
Other translations for the three key concepts, as verbs :
守る : Shu (mamoru) Defend, protect, obey, guard
破る : Ha (yaburu) tear, break, destroy, defeat
離れる : Ri (hanareru) detach, separate, go your own way
Some equivalents in western pop culture :
Learn the rules before you break them.
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.
Demolish the rules to keep the tradition.
Follow the teachings and fundamentals.
Adapt and make them your own.
Be creative, don’t be shackled by common sense.
In my experience, of all the martial arts Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is the most open to change and evolution.
Traditional arts are often stuck in stage 1; following old curriculums to the letter, treating the founder and his methods as the end-goal to be emulated, not as the starting point for more.
BJJ is like an open-source martial arts, with contributors all over the world trying new things, and these new elements clash in the free-market of sparring and competitions, where the useless bits are discarded and the useful ones are picked up and iterated upon.
My son is 16 y/o and often jumps to stage 3, sometimes perhaps without trying enough to acquire the fundamentals of a new concept before breaking it, but it mostly works for him. Around our gym he’s known as creative and unpredictable, in a good way ^^.
More seriously, when thinking about recent examples of Jiu Jitsu teachers who absorbed the fundamentals to such a high-level that they created their own variations and changed the game, John Danaher (BJJ Fanatics) and Keenan Cornelius (Keenan Online) jump to my mind, but there are many others for sure, and the Jiu Jitsu community actively encourages that creativity mindset.
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other frameworks to think about mastery :
Four Stages of Competences
Skill Acquisition
