The Hidden Cost of Obsession

I sprained my ankle 3 days before I was about to grade for my yellow belt in karate.

It was a Thursday night practice, and we started with routine rounds of warm-ups and pre-arranged forms. Then, we put on our protective gear, partnered off and started the first hour of sparring.

Maybe it was adrenaline, or maybe it was carelessness; during my 2^nd round, my right foot slipped near the edge of the mat, and I remembered looking at my foot, wondering if it’s supposed to bend at a near 90-degree angle.

I was in shock. I couldn’t stand up straight, and my ankle kept rolling onto its side while making clicking noises. Then, after I bowed out of the dojo and sat down on a chair, I saw a tennis ball-sized swelling on my right ankle.

At that moment, my world came crashing down. See, ever since I started karate a year ago as a white belt, my only goal was to grade for a coloured belt. I’ve waited for this moment for an entire year, and this north star carried me through stressful exams, business troubles, long writing hours and bouts of self-doubt. In a way, karate was my spiritual baseline, and it gave me strength to face everything else.

Sensei rushed over and cracked open an ice pack. ‘How’s the pain?’ he said, ‘can you move it alright?’

I couldn’t respond, because I was scared that he might pull me off the grading list upon seeing the injury.

‘Looks like you can still move it alright,’ he said as he wrapped some bandage around the ankle, ‘just a bit of swelling, you’ll be alright.’

But in my mind, it felt like my ankle was anything but alright.

I’m the kind of person to put 100% into everything to the point of obsession. I did it with my academic work, with my writing, with my business and now with this newsletter.

But this sprained ankle gave me a few days to think: is obsession the prerequisite for excellence? Or could it be a destructive force on the path of lifelong learning?

See, a week before I sprained my ankle, I had won a gold medal in my first karate tournament. Yet, achievements like this only pushed me to work harder because I didn’t want it to be a one-off. I want to sustain excellence every second, every hour and every day.

But this is what leads to our worst downfalls. When we are obsessive, we’ll lose sight of everything we have learned and accomplished. We’ll trade the steady path of mastery for a quick hit of progress, and as a result, we start to overlook the basic steps that made us excellent in the first place.  

And this also applies to my writing career. Last week, I wrapped up all the edits for my forthcoming book, and my publisher has sent the manuscript for production + printing. Yet, this made me even more obsessive, to the point where I tried to re-write multiple chapters even though the content was already locked in.

But if I’m completely honest, the good parts of the book didn’t come out of an obsessive burst of creativity. In fact, it was that steady effort over two years of writing that allowed me to finish writing the book in the first place.

The same goes for karate. My grading isn’t and has never been the result of a few nights of obsessive drilling. It was the result of a whole year of steady training.

A brown belt once gave me some advice:

‘Focus on your form, because your worst punch will come out in sparring and grading.’

And the entire point of training is really just that: make sure you perfect your worst punch, and everything else will fall into place.

After spending a few days in bed, the swelling subsided, but there was still a nasty bruise around my ankle. To my surprise, sensei still allowed me to grade with an injury, so I bought a roll of sports tape, wrapped it tight around my ankle and faced the 3-hour grading head-on.

Pain followed me with every stance, every punch and every kick. There was no space to think, so I relied on the only thing I knew: my consistent training.

In sparring, I remembered what the brown belt said: perfect your worst punch and focus on the best technique I could perform without putting strain on my foot. Before I knew it, the grading was over, and I received my yellow belt a week later.

Nowadays, whenever I head into practice or sit down to write, I try to remember that even though there’s a lot of romance in obsession, progress only comes from consistency. And whenever I get a little bit ahead of myself, my first policy is to perfect my worst punch and let the rest fall into their place.

Until next week

Robin