A 400-Year-Old Book Changed How I Learn Everything
6 Ancient Samurai Principles For Mastering Any Skill
I know you’ve gotta be tired of hearing about prodigy stories and people who become a massive success before the age of 25. You’ve seen the 40 under 40 lists, and you feel nervous as the time creeps along closer to the big 4-0, but you’re no closer to doing something extraordinary than when you graduated from high school.
But what if I told you that by following the lessons from an ancient book of swordsmanship, anyone can master any skill so that you not only catch up but leave everyone behind?
It’s a bold claim, but I’m confident that if you follow the six principles I lay out in this video, you can shoot above the 90th percentile in any domain or discipline you desire.
And what makes me so confident in that assertion? Well, I’ve done it in 4 completely different disciplines:
I was a Pennsylvania Golden Gloves, National champion, and nationally ranked amateur boxer who went on to have a 13-1-1 record as a professional despite not taking up the sport of boxing until I was 22.
I’ve learned Spanish to B1 level despite not studying the language until I was 26.
I have a degree in Physics and minor in mathematics despite not only going to going back to school at 30 but also failing most of my math classes in high school and not even graduating.
Less impressively, I’ve gotten my peak chess.com rating to 1850, although lately, it’s tanked a little because I thought I was good enough to play with my toddler son running around in the background. Spoiler alert: I’m not.
If you have a strategy, then you can master anything. Or, at the very least, you can become better than the average person in an above-average timeframe.
During this journey of learning how to box, chess, speak Spanish, and learn physics, I learned how to learn, and one of the most unlikely sources of instruction was from Miyamoto Musashi’s “The Book of Five Rings.”
The first time I read that book was because I thought it would give me a competitive advantage in the ring. Before Floyd “Money” Mayweather was bragging about going 50-0 as a pro boxer in the relatively safe confines of a boxing ring with padded gloves, a referee, and rules, Musashi retired undefeated from a career of wandering the Japanese countryside and picking over 60 sword fights to master the deadly sword-fighting art of “Ichi NIchen-Ryu.”
And we know he went undefeated in over 60 bouts because he lived to tell about it before passing on peacefully in retirement as a bit of a hermit. But there was more to Musashi’s life than just taking names and kicking ass.
He also practiced a wide variety of arts, including painting, sculpture, calligraphy, poetry, Zen meditation, and Buddhism.
Musashi understood that “how you do one thing is how you do everything.”
I’ve seen people hate on that quote and call the idea ridiculous.
“Like, come on man, how I shower has nothing to do with how I drive my car…has nothing to do with how I talk to girls. They’re completely different activities!”
And these guys are right. On the surface, these are completely different activities, and the idea doesn’t make sense.
However, your mindset, personality, and approach to challenges all come together to give you a general style for approaching challenges.
While the tactical mechanics of your approach appear to be different, the strategic approach is the same, whether you’re learning another language, how to calculate the motion of projectiles, or how to knock guy’s heads off.
Musashi understood this perfectly over almost 500 years ago when he said “If you know the way broadly, you will see it everything.”
Although we are well beyond the age of swords, the lessons for learning and polymathic development laid out in The Book of Five Rings are stil applicable in the modern world—perhaps even more so because there is just so much more to learn and the world has become far more complex than is was 400 years ago.
One of the most surprising and interesting applications is how we apply these concepts to learning and goal attainment.
In this essay, I’ll be covering the six key ideas from The Book of Five Rings, how you can use those learn and accomplish anything you want, and if you stick around to the end, I’ll tell you the one thing you need to have gained a massive advantage in any endeavor that I think even the great Musashi missed.
Let’s get into it!
Develop the Proper Strategy
The first lesson comes before you start learning something new and requires understanding something fundamental about developing a strategy.
Musashi talks about “The Way” in various contexts throughout the Book of Five Rings.
When Musashi speaks of “The Way,” he is referring to the way of strategy.. In common everyday colloquial speech, people use the words “strategy” and “tactic” interchangeably, but our discussion requires more precision.
Strategy is the overall plan you’ll use to achieve a goal. Tactics are the methods for achieving that plan.
Language learning is a great place to see this difference. Let’s say your goal is to speak Spanish.
One aspect of your strategy for achieving this goal is to increase your comprehension of spoken Spanish, because after watching your children learn to speak, you realized they could understand you long before they could speak to you. Therefore, you believe that developing the ability to understand is crucial, so you build your strategy around that.
The tactics for achieving this goal might be to listen to Spanish music and dictate the words you hear or to watch a Spanish Telenovels with a notepad.
Strategy is the ability to plan for the future in such a way that you can maximize any benefits and minimize any losses. A great strategist is indistinguishable from an accurate fortune teller.
If you did just those things, you’d be able to create more opportunities, have fewer problems, and be more satisfied overall. Your particular skill set doesn’t matter nearly as much as your ability to live strategically.
This is the first lesson: developing the proper strategy.
An interesting result of this approach to life is that you stop fearing many things, namely failure. When you live with intention, as a strategic mindset forces you to do, you understand that there are no losses—just learning lessons. You see that there are no setbacks—only set-ups.
You come to realize that one of the most powerful ideas you can have is that given enough time, you can learn anything, as long as you stick to the strategy you develop. And from that strategy, then you can determine your tactics.
You can figure out how you’ll accomplish your strategy, what does success look like, and develop a practice or training routine that is optimized around your specific strategy.
If you live strategically, it’s very difficult to have a problem. At the very least, it becomes nearly impossible to be surprised by them. A great strategist is nearly indistinguishable from a fortune teller.
But even with a good strategy in place, it won’t do you any good if you don’t avoid a massive potential pitfall in your strategic learning journey.
Do the Work That Matters, Not Just What Looks Good
When you do something as serious as sword fighting to the death, it becomes very easy to tell who has skill and who is just posturing.
In Musashi’s day, there was no instagram to capture every training session. The only way to know who was good was whether they could fight or not and the only way to know that was by fighting.
But why fake it like you have the skill when you’ll get exposed eventually? Because the rush of fame and recognition is more addictive than the anguish of being exposed is painful. Even if it meant losing your head. Musashi observed this phenomenon in his time when he wrote, “Recently there have been people getting on in the world as strategists, but they are usually just sword-fencers.”
Referring to them as just “sword-fencers” was Musashi’s way of calling these would-be strategists posers.This brings us to the second lesson of strategic learning: doing the work that matters; not just the work that looks good.
Musashi speaks often in The Book of Five Rings about the problem of favoring one weapon. When a fighter would do this, It reduced his effectiveness if he didn’t have that weapon, and it made him shy away from situations where he wouldn’t be able to use it.
Relying on one weapon and becoming a one-trick pony meant that these warriors hadn’t embraced strategy. They only embraced the tactics that allowed them to demonstrate skill with that particular weapon in relatively limited surroundings.
This lesson is pertinent for modern times. If you only lean on your strengths and avoid developing your deficiencies, you’ll have set up your life to avoid your weaknesses, and you’ll only put yourself in situations that favor your strengths. This can work for a little while, but eventually your weaknesses will be exposed. Now this happens to everyone, but when it happens to someone who is intentionally avoiding working on their weak areas, it is particularly devastating.
Not only is it embarrassing, it can wreck your confidence to the point where you won’t ever try again. By trying to look good, you’ll never actually become good enough.
You’ll never become a sword master. You’ll just be a fencer and when you’re inevitably placed into a situation where you’re expected to perform to the level that your abilities present themselves as, you’ll fall on your face.
If you never do the work of becoming a real sword fight, you’ll always be just a “sword fencer,” and your fear of being exposed will keep you from actually learning how to handle yourself. This is always bad enough, but it will prevent you from taking advantage of the third strategic learning lesson.
However, before we go any further, I invite you to check out my free e-book, “The Five Pillars of Learning Mastery.
Teach to Learn
Teachers need students just as much as students need teachers. You can’t be a teacher without a student, and you can’t be a student without a teacher. It doesn’t matter what the nature of the student and teacher are. The fact remains that they both need to exist.
Muasahi recognized this when he says in the Book of Five Rings, ”The teacher is as a needle, the disciple is as thread.”
Just as the needle gives the thread purpose and direction, the thread does the same thing for the needle.
The third strategic learning lesson is this: If you want to learn something better, attempt to teach it.
It will very quickly humble you because as you develop mastery, you tend to forget what it was like to not have it. This is called the Curse of Knowledge.
Formally, The Curse of Knowledge is a cognitive bias where someone who is knowledgeable about a topic has difficulty imagining what it’s like to NOT have that knowledge.
If you want to be a better teacher, never forget what it’s like to be a student. The best way to accomplish this is to learn a new skill occasionally. This will keep you humble, and that humility will serve you for implementing the fourth strategic learning lesson:
Balance Your Development
In the age of outsourcing and virtual assistants, there is the popular idea that you should only focus on your strengths and outsource everything else. I don’t actually disagree with this idea, but I think it should only be implemented after you have gained enough knowledge in a domain to *at least* know if someone else is doing a good job.
One reason I haven’t outsourced any of the YouTube process—compared to me outsource a lot of my website design—is that I don’t fully understand enough of this platform to spot a hustler. Or, if I’m going to give them the best intentions, I don’t know enough to know if they can do a good job.
This protects me from wasting time and money and from possibly being outright taken advantage of. Musashi didn’t have guys dropping in his DMs pitching him services not did he have the option of hiring virtual assistants from the Phillipines, but his experience in battle taught him the folly of never working on your weak areas. “Musashi says”
You should not have a favourite weapon. To become over-familiar with one weapon is as much a fault as not knowing it sufficiently well. You should not copy others, but use weapons which you can handle properly. It is bad for commanders and troopers to have likes and dislikes. These are things you must learn thoroughly.
The fourth strategic learning lesson is “Work on your weaknesses until they’re no longer liabilities. Work on your strengths until they alone can carry you.”
It’s dangerous to neglect any aspect of your development. This leads to a fundamental imbalance that leaves you vulnerable. You must strive to develop yourself as evenly as possible because you’re only as strong as your weakest point and only as disciplined as your most tempting vice.
Also, keep in mind that the difficulty of a task is irrelevant if it’s vital to your success. When you remember this, the last two lines of this Musashi’s quote take on additional relevance. How you feel about something—positively or negatively—should not affect the energy you put forth into attaining or accomplishing it if it’s required to reach your goal.
The insistence on things being enjoyable is at best, a major weakness and at worst, a fatal liability. Now this mindset shift might be difficult for someone to implement, but the fifth strategic learning lesson gives us a method for changing how we approach difficult problems.
Change Your Perspective to Solve Problems
Just because you have eyes doesn’t mean you really see any more than having ears means you can actually hear.
Anyone who isn’t blind or deaf is capable of seeing or hearing, but to truly make sense of the world around you, you must perceive and listen. In the Book of Five Rings, Musashi notes that “Perception is strong and sight weak.”
This is not just a semantic difference.
If you are considered “perceptive”, then you’re capable of seeing more than what others see. If you’re a good listener, you absorb more from the same conversation than other people do. We aim for perception because it allows us to read between the lines, discover intent, and discern the true essence of things.
The fifth strategic learning lesson is to change your perspective to solve problems.
When you can perceive a thing from all angles and distances, all mysteries will vanish. Many people get stuck looking at situations only one way, limiting their capabilities. It becomes impossible for them to see or understand a situation or person.
Musashi cultivated this ability by taking on different projects that developed his different abilities. In the Book of Five Rings, he tells us that, “In strategy it is important to see distant things as if they were close and to take a distanced view of close things.”
It may feel like more work to force yourself to consider changing views and consider different angles, but it’s in this diligence of inspecting your surroundings that you’re able to learn as much as you can about them. That knowledge is powerful because it keeps you from being surprised by something that could have easily been caught had you just looked harder.
Aim to develop your perception so you aren’t fooled by what the world shows you. This perception helps you to see new solutions to old problems that your competitors are stumped by.
Approach people this way as well. View strangers as if they are close friends and close friends as if they were strangers. When you see things differently, you’ll catch something new that you previous missed, but solves all of your problems, academic, personal, or otherwise.
But changing your perspective is useless if you don’t implement the next strategic learning lesson.
Never Neglect the Process
The only thing worse than doing the right things and losing is doing the wrong things and winning. You may attribute your success to your own efforts when the reality is that you got lucky. But you don’t see it.
In psychology, this is known as “self-serving bias.” It’s the idea that you see all of your successes as the result of skill and your failures as the result of luck. This is dangerous because it distorts reality and will cause you to overestimate your abilities, underestimate your opponent’s, and completely ignore chances to improve.
Musashi won over 60 sword fighting battles, many against skilled opponents because he conquered the tendency to overrate his skill level and neglect practice. He warns others of this folly when he says, “Even if you kill an enemy, if it is not based on what you have learned it is not the true Way.”
This is a brutal lesson of self-serving bias and the sixth strategic learning lesson: “Never neglect the process.”
Musashi is telling us that it doesn’t matter if you have a favorable outcome if you attain it following the wrong process. At best, you were victorious despite committing many errors. At worst, you got lucky, and you’ll misinterpret that for skill.
When I was an adult teaching myself the math necessary to get a physics degree, I could simply look up the answers to the problems. This could have made me lazy and allowed me to overestimate how strong my math skills actually were. So, instead, I made sure that I worked through the process, solving the problems in ways that guaranteed that I actually understood what I was doing.
I use a similar technique in Spanish to create different ways to express the same idea. This keeps me from believing that my memorized responses indicated how well I understand the language.
The former condition is fixable and teachable. However, if you misinterpret luck for skill, you will think your skill level is higher than it really is, and you will be destroyed when real competition shows up.
Refining the processes tends to produce refined outcomes. The inverse doesn’t tend to be true.
The Missing Element
While Musashi’s principles are invaluable for individual skill development, they don’t fully address the human element of learning and achievement. As a lone warrior, Musashi never had to manage or lead others extensively.
For those aspects of strategic thinking—particularly in group settings—we must look to other sources like Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War.” However, for individual skill mastery, Musashi’s principles remain unmatched.
Whether you’re learning a new language, mastering a sport, or pursuing academic excellence, these ancient principles can guide your journey from novice to master. The key is to apply them consistently and trust in the process, even when progress seems slow.
Remember: Extraordinary achievement isn’t about natural talent or starting early—it’s about approaching learning with the right strategy and mindset. These principles have worked for centuries, from sword fighting to physics, and they can work for you too.
Ancient wisdom for the win again. Awesome post per usual
Great tips as always.