When I began learning karate, I would have told you I know very little about karate. When I achieved Shodan (first black belt), I would have told you I know a lot about karate. Now as a Godan (fifth level black belt) I will once again tell you I know very little. Hopefully the article will explain why.
On February 12th 2002 U.S Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld said:
“as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
Whilst Rumsfeld was talking about political matters, I feel that this statement is very important to karateka, thusly I write this brief piece to explain why I think this statement is so important, and how it can be used to improve yourself as a karateka.
Learning is the key here as if no learning takes place that in turn mean no development takes place, no progress made and no self-improvement. I believe the very essence of karate do is self-improvement and if self-improvement can’t happen without learning, then every karateka should always strive to learn.
To expand on what Rumsfeld said your ‘known knowns’ are the sum of your knowledge, it comprises everything that you have learnt.
Your ‘known unknowns’ comprise of all of the information that with your current level of knowledge, you have been able to determine exists but have yet to learn the information. There are a couple of reasons as to why any given information might be in this category. The first is that you know the relevant knowledge to uncover the answer but have yet to do so. The second being that you don’t have the relevant knowledge to uncover the answer.
Your ‘unknown unknowns’ comprise of all of the information, that with your current level of knowledge, you are unable to or have yet to determine exists
So now, we combine the statement and learning together and talk about how this combination can help you improve as a karateka.
While it is possible for an external source to move a piece of information from the unknown unknowns category to the ‘known knowns’ category, the primary method of learning is moving ‘known unknowns’ into the ‘known knowns’ category.
What however is often missed, is that as the ‘known knowns’ category expands, an amount of information in the ‘unknown unknowns’ category can be moved into the ‘known unknowns’ category.
So, putting this into a karate context, I see often that as people improve their knowledge, they abandon the earlier material and never going back to it. For example, the keikogata series – how often do you re-examine those 3 kata? When was the last time you went through tanshiki kata nidan and asked ‘am I right about my understanding or have I missed something?’
The conclusion that I draw from all of this is that the more you learn, and the vaster the knowledge you possess, the more important it is to relook at everything to apply your new knowledge to old material. You should never think that you know all there is to know about something as there will always be some perspective you haven’t seen. To those at the beginning of your karate journey remember as you progress to look back once and awhile you might see something you missed. To those further through your journey, think back to where you came from and how much you know now compared to then, and try to imagine how much you still don’t know.