Mastery (59 page)

If we look closely at the career path of Freddie Roach, we can see a transparent example of the development of mastery. His father, a former New England featherweight champion himself, had pushed all of his sons into the sport at a very early age. Freddie Roach himself had begun serious training as a boxer at the age of six, and this continued all the way to the age of eighteen, when he turned professional. Those twelve years added up to an extremely deep level of practice and immersion in the sport. For the next eight years of his life, until he retired from the sport, he fought fifty-three bouts, an intense fighting schedule. As someone who enjoyed practicing and
training, the number of hours he spent in the gym as a professional boxer was much higher than that of other fighters. After retirement he stayed around the sport, working as an apprentice trainer for Eddie Futch. By the time he began his own career as a trainer, he had accumulated so many overall hours of work in the sport that he already saw boxing from a perspective that was much wider and deeper than that of other trainers. And so when he felt that there was an even higher level to aim for, this intuition was based on the depth of all those years of practical experience. Inspired by this feeling, he was able to analyze his own work up to that point and see its limitations.

Roach knew from his own career that so much of boxing is mental. A fighter who enters the ring with a clear sense of purpose and strategy, and with the confidence that comes from complete preparation, has a much better chance of prevailing. It was one thing to imagine giving his fighters such an advantage, but it was quite another to bring it to pass. Before a fight there are so many distractions, and during a match it is so easy to simply react emotionally to the punches and lose any sense of strategy. To overcome these problems, he developed a two-pronged approach—he crafted a comprehensive and fluid strategy based on his perception of the opponent’s habits, and he imprinted this strategy into the nervous system of his fighters through hours of mitt work. On this level, his training did not consist of individual elements that he worked on with his boxers, but of an integrated, seamless form of preparation that closely simulated the experience of a fight, repeated over and over again. It took many years of a hit-and-miss process to create this high-level training, but when it all came together his success rate skyrocketed.

In any competitive environment in which there are winners or losers, the person who has the wider, more global perspective will inevitably prevail. The reason is simple: such a person will be able to think beyond the moment and control the overall dynamic through careful strategizing. Most people are perpetually locked in the present. Their decisions are overly influenced by the most immediate event; they easily become emotional and ascribe greater significance to a problem than it should have in reality. Moving toward mastery will naturally bring you a more global outlook, but it is always wise to expedite the process by training yourself early on to continually enlarge your perspective. You can do so by always reminding yourself of the overall purpose of the work you are presently engaged in and how this meshes with your long-term goals. In dealing with any problem, you must train yourself to look at how it inevitably connects to a larger picture. If your work is not having the desired effect, you must look at it from all angles until you find the source of the problem. You must not merely observe the rivals
in your field, but dissect and uncover their weaknesses. “Look wider and think further ahead” must be your motto. Through such mental training, you will smooth the path to mastery while separating yourself ever further from the competition.

6. Submit to the other—The Inside-out Perspective

As narrated in
chapter 2
(
here
), in December 1977, Daniel Everett, along with his wife, Keren, and their two children, arrived in a remote village in the Amazonian jungles of Brazil, where they would end up spending a good part of the next twenty years of their lives. The village belonged to a tribe scattered in the area known as the Pirahã. Everett had been sent there by the Summer Institute of Languages (SIL)—a Christian organization that trains future missionaries in the linguistic skills that will enable them to translate the Bible into indigenous languages and help spread the Gospel. Everett himself was an ordained minister.

The directors at SIL considered Pirahã one of the last frontiers in their quest to translate the Bible into all languages; it represented perhaps the most challenging language for any outsider to learn. The Pirahã had lived for centuries in the same Amazonian basin, resisting all attempts to assimilate or learn Portuguese. Living in such isolation, a point was reached in which no one outside of the Pirahã could speak or understand their language. Several missionaries had been sent there after World War II, and all had failed to make much progress; despite their training and linguistic talents, they found the language maddeningly elusive.

Daniel Everett was one of the most promising linguists the SIL had seen in a long time, and when the institute presented him with the challenge of the Pirahã he was more than excited. His wife’s parents had been missionaries stationed in Brazil, and Keren had grown up in an environment not too dissimilar to a Pirahã village. It seemed the family was up to the task, and in his first months there Everett made good progress. He attacked the Pirahã language with great energy. Using the methods he had learned at SIL, he slowly built up a vocabulary and the ability to speak some rudimentary sentences. He copied everything down on index cards and carried them in his belt loop. He was a tireless researcher. Although life in the village presented some challenges for him and his family, he was comfortable with the Pirahã and hoped they had accepted his presence. But soon he began to feel that all was not right.

Part of the SIL method was to encourage immersion in the indigenous culture as the best means for learning the language. Missionaries are essentially abandoned to their fate, to sink or swim in the local culture without any crutches to lean on. Perhaps unconsciously, however, Everett could
not help but keep some distance and feel ever so slightly superior to the backward culture of the Pirahã. He became aware of this inner distance after several incidents that occurred in the village.

First, several months into their stay, his wife and daughter nearly died from malaria. He was rather perturbed by the lack of empathy from the Pirahã about this. A little later, Everett and his wife tried desperately to nurse back to health a Pirahã infant that was gravely ill. The Pirahã were certain the baby would die, and seemed bothered by the missionaries’ efforts. Then one day, Everett and his wife discovered the baby was dead; the Pirahã had forced alcohol down its throat to kill it. Although he tried to rationalize this event to himself, he could not help but feel some disgust. On another occasion, for apparently no reason, a group of Pirahã men had gotten very drunk and were looking for him in order to kill him. He managed to escape the threat, and nothing else ever happened, but it made him wonder about the safety of his family.

More than anything, however, he began to feel disappointed by the Pirahã themselves. He had read much about Amazonian tribes, and by any standards the Pirahã did not measure up. They had virtually no material culture—no important tools, artwork, costumes, or jewelry. If women needed a basket, they would find some moist palm leaves, quickly weave them together, use the basket once or twice, and then abandon it. They placed no value on material things, and nothing in their villages was designed to last very long. They had few rituals, and as far as he could tell no real folklore or creation myths. One time he had been woken up by excitement in the village—apparently a spirit who lived above the clouds had been sighted and was warning them not to go into the jungle. He looked at what they were looking at and saw nothing. There were no colorful stories being told about this, no relation to any myth, just some villagers excitedly staring off into empty space. They seemed to him like Boy Scouts on a camping trip, or a group of hippies—a tribe that had somehow lost its own culture.

This disappointment and unease coincided with frustration in his own work. He had made some progress with the language, but it seemed that the more words and phrases he learned, the more questions and puzzles he uncovered. He would think that he had mastered a particular expression, only to find it meant something different or something larger than he had imagined. He could see the children learning the language so easily, but to him who now lived among them, it seemed beyond his reach. Then one day he experienced what he would later realize was a turning point.

The thatch roof of his family’s hut needed replacing, and he decided to enlist some villagers in the effort. Although he felt he had integrated himself into their lives, he had never ventured very far into the surrounding jungles with the Pirahã men. Finally, on this occasion he would go much
farther than before to gather the necessary materials. Suddenly, during this trip, he saw an entirely different side to them. While he was stomping and whacking his way through the brush, they seemed to glide through the thick jungle without being touched by a single branch. He was not able to keep up with them, and so he stopped and rested. In the distance he could hear strange sounds—the Pirahã men were clearly speaking to one another, but their words were somehow transposed into whistles. He realized that in the jungle they used this different form of communication, one that would not stand out from the jungle hum. It was a marvelous way to talk without attracting attention, and must have been a great help in hunting.

Now he joined them on subsequent forays into the jungle, and his respect for them increased. They could hear and see things he could not perceive at all—dangerous animals, signs of something different or suspicious. Occasionally, it would rain when it was not the rainy season, and in the jungle they had a sixth sense for the weather and knew when a heavy rain was coming hours before it arrived. (They could even predict the arrival of a plane several hours in advance, although he never figured out how.) They could identify every plant and its possible medicinal purposes, and knew every square inch of the jungle. If they saw bubbles or ripples in the river, they could instantly tell whether the movement was from a falling rock or from some dangerous animal lurking below the surface. They had a mastery of their environment that he could not sense by seeing them in the village. And as he became aware of this, he began to understand that their life and culture, which at first glance had seemed rather poor according to our standards, was actually something remarkably rich. Over the course of hundreds of years they had adapted a way of life that was perfectly wedded to the harsh circumstances of their environment.

Now, as he looked back on the same incidents that had troubled him before, he could see them in a new light. Living so closely to death on a daily basis (the jungle was teeming with dangers and diseases), they had developed a rather stoic attitude. They could not afford to waste time or energy on mourning rituals or on too much empathy. They could sense when someone was going to die, and being certain that the infant the Everetts had tried to nurse was doomed, they thought it easier and better to hasten its death and not look back. The village men who had thought of killing him had heard that he did not like their drinking; they feared that he was yet another outsider who was going to impose his values and authority on them. They had their reasons for behaving as they did, but only with time could he see them clearly.

He extended his participation in their lives to other aspects—hunting and fishing excursions, gathering roots and vegetables in the fields, and so on. He and his family would share meals with them and interacted with
them as much as possible, and in this way he slowly immersed himself in the Pirahã culture. Although it was not immediately apparent, this also initiated a change in his learning of the language itself. It started to come more naturally—less from the tireless work of a field researcher and more from within, from simply living inside their culture. He began to think like a Pirahã, to foresee their reactions to what some visiting Westerner would ask of them; he got inside their sense of humor, and the kinds of stories they liked to relate around the campfire.

And as he began to understand more aspects of their culture and to communicate with a higher degree of proficiency, he noticed more and more peculiarities to the Pirahã language. Everett had been indoctrinated in the prevailing beliefs in linguistics championed by Noam Chomsky. According to Chomsky all languages share certain features, which he designates as Universal Grammar. This grammar implies a common neurological trait to the brain that allows for the learning of languages among children. According to this theory, we are hardwired for language. But the more time Everett spent among the Pirahã, the more signs he saw that their language did not share some of these common features. They had no numbers and no system for counting. They had no specific words for colors, but rather described colors through phrases that related to real objects.

According to Universal Grammar, the most important trait shared by all languages is what is known as
recursion,
the embedding of phrases within phrases that gives language an almost infinite potential to relate experiences. An example would be, “the food you are eating smells good.” Everett could find absolutely no evidence for recursion in Pirahã. They would express such ideas in simple, assertive phrases, such as “You are eating food. That food smells good.” These exceptions to Universal Grammar began to pile up as he looked for them.

At the same time, the Pirahã culture began to make increasing sense to him, which altered his conception of their language. For instance, one time he learned a new word that a Pirahã explained to him meant “what is in your head when you sleep.” The word then means to dream. But the word was used with a special intonation that Pirahã use when they are referring to a new experience. Questioning further, he saw that to them dreaming is simply a different form of experience, not at all a fiction. A dream is as real and immediate to them as anything they encounter in waking life. With more and more of these examples, a theory began to stir in his head, one that he would call the Immediate Experience Principle (IEP). What this means is that for the Pirahã all that concerns them are things that can be experienced in the here and now, or that relate to something that someone personally has experienced in the very recent past.