Walking the Path of Mastery: Putting on the White Belt

Another martial arts concept from George Leonard’s Mastery is the symbol, borrowed from the dojo, of consciously accepting your student status, opening yourself to be enlightened and putting on the white belt of the novice. There may came a day when you will earn another belt in your particular discipline, but when beginning something anew, you must always be willing to put on the white belt.

The beauty of the white belt is that it shields you. It protects your ego. It allows you to say “I’m not stupid, I’m not incompetent, but I acknowledge I know nothing about this discipline.” One of the bigger rude awakenings in my shooting career has been starting to shoot USPSA after years of IDPA with a perception, based on what I’d been told, of where I “should” classify. Because I was unwilling to to put on the white belt and enter USPSA as a novice, I was extremely frustrated when I barely classified a rank below where I was expecting.

Putting on the white belt is one of the most powerful things you can do. It can open your eyes. It can help you to improve much faster. It can make you feel young again. Later, of course, as you walk the path of mastery, you will be able to exchange your white belt for a higher rank in a particular discipline, but never will you be totally rid of it.

Wearing the white belt is also not quitting, accepting defeat, or weaseling out. It takes discipline to empty your cup so that it can be filled, and to maintain the mindset of the student. I just finished my first session of playing league 8-ball pool and miserably failed to allow myself to be a novice. When I walked in on the first day, I admitted to my new team how terrible I was. (Of course, in pool as in shooting, never having competed, I really didn’t understand how terrible I was.) In a handicap system where players are ranked with 2 being the lowest and 7 being the highest, I came in as all guys do, as a 4. I clung to that for two weeks before dropping to a 2, just long enough to think that maybe I had some knack or skill at this game after all. Those two weeks set the tone for the fourteen that followed, and I never really gave that up. I always felt like I was underclassed because I’d established that idea that I was no novice.

I got better over the months, but I still remained a 2. I was frustrated by losing, so I didn’t stick around to learn from my teammates. I rejected the white belt and suffered for it.

Mastery closes with the story of Jigoro Kana, the man who both invented Judo and started the practice of wearing black and white belts in martial arts. He, perhaps more than anyone else, would understand the symbolic importance of the novice’s white belt.

When [he] was quite old and close to death, the story goes, he called his students around him and told them we wanted to be buried in his white belt. What a touching story; how humble of the world’s highest-ranking judoist in his last days to ask for the emblem of a beginner! But Kano’s request, I eventually realized, was less humility than realism. At the moment of death, the ultimate transformation, we are all white belts. And if death makes beginners of us, so does life — again and again. In the master’s secret mirror, even at the moment of highest renown and accomplishment, there is an image of the newest student in the class, eager for knowledge, willing to play the fool.

Note: I am indebted to Michael Bane and his excellent podcast Downrange Radio. He turned me on to Mastery, and I have found him to be quite correct that one is never done reading that book, you just start over as soon as you finish.