Words that Never Leave You: "The interesting thing was, I paid for karate, while judo was free, so I spent most of my time doing karate. In retrospect, it was the opposite of what I should have done."
Part Nineteen in an ongoing series from Hollie's book "Words That Never Leave You: Fifty Pearls of Wisdom and Reflection from Survivors Across the World."
Matt Larsen is the kind of person you wouldn’t want to cross while up to no good: calm, organized, and could probably split an adversary in two with his bare hands. He has long been dubbed the “Father of Modern Combatives,” distinguished as bringing to life the U.S. Army’s modern combatives precept and establishing the Army Combatives School. He serves as the reigning Director of Combatives at West Point.
“Being a good fighter frees people up to not have to shoot. It gives us the ability to have a much more nuanced force, and that is what we are trying to do in a country like ours,” he explained. “We want to be a compassionate force. We are not trying to be the bad guys; we are trying to be the guys with a much more nuanced way of utilizing their force, which is an important thing.”
Matt’s teachings hail from a multi-faceted string of disciplines and lived experiences, born out of time spent as an infantryman in the Marines stationed in Japan in 1984.
“The interesting thing was, I paid for karate, while judo was free, so I spent most of my time doing karate. In retrospect, it was the opposite of what I should have done,” Matt notes. “It wasn’t a waste of time, but it was less productive training.”
How routinely do we opt for the freebie, the no-cost subscription or the cheapest selection on the menu, and are we doing ourselves a disservice in that process? When we cough up our hard-earned dollars to pay for something, we often value it much more – and get a lot more out of it – than we do when we take the giveaway instead. The best products and services almost always come with a price tag for a reason.
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** Short read of meaningful lessons gleaned from the ordinary forced to becme extraordinary
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