The Japanese ‘3 Doors to Success’
‘三磨の位’ (San-ma-no-kurai) is a term derived from the Japanese martial art of Kendo (way of the sword) and can be applied to your life for discipline and self-improvement.
The teachings in Kendo schools explain that the secret to achieving skill and mastery in Kendo is through the San-ma-no-kurai, which means ‘3 levels of improvement.
The 3 levels are simple:
- To learn.
- To practice what you have learned.
- To refine and tweak what you have learned.
It’s believed that it’s essential to nurture both internal and external skills (observation being external and intuition being internal) in order to become holistically developed and to be able to read your opponents' intentions, a lesson that applies to humans and their behavior, and not just in the world of Kendo.
Although we all learn and develop, it’s critical to continue to train and refine a skill in order to maintain and further improve on it, a feature of the Kaizen philosophy of the Japanese. The Kaizen philosophy says that perfection does not exist, and no one can ever totally master anything and one must therefore continually strive for improvement.
This ongoing cycle of perpetual improvement is voiced within the Japanese saying “Today I must beat the me of yesterday”.
Short story #5 from the series ’7 secrets of Japanese success’.
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