Meditations on Violence by Rory Miller

• People are weird. They have an almost infinite ability to learn and communicate. At the same time, this amazing ability is used as much for fantasy and entertainment as it is for information and survival.
• The minute you don a black belt, the minute you step in front of a class to teach, you are seen as an expert on violence.
• The simple truth is that many of these experts, these priests of Mars, have no experience with violence. Very, very few have experienced enough to critically look at what they have been taught, and what they are teaching, and separate the myth from reality.
• Fair doesn’t happen in real life, not if the bad guys have anything to say about it and not if the professional good guys do, either.
• One of the ways we complicate things is by telling stories, especially stories about ourselves. This story we tell ourselves it our identify. The essence of every good story s conflict. So our identify, the central character of this story that we tell ourselves, is based largely on how we deal with conflict. If there has been little conflict in the life, the character, our identity, is mostly fictional.
• You are what you are, not what you think you are. Violence is what it is, not necessary what you have been told.
• Never, ever, ever delegate responsibility for your own safety. Never, ever, ever override your own experience and common sense on the say-so of some self-appointed “expert”.
• Never, ever, ever ignore what your eyes see because it isn’t what you imagined. And strive to always know the difference between what your eyes are seeing and what your brain is adding.
• No matter how good you are at generalizing, there is a point where it doesn’t work and you descend into philosophy at the cost of survival.
• Here’s a rule for life: You don’t get to pick what kinds of bad things will happen to you. You may prepare all your life to take on a cannibalistic knife-wielding sociopath. You may get stuck with a soccer riot. Or a road rage incident with a semi. Or a pickup full of baseball bat swinging drunks. Or nothing at all. You don’t get to choose.
• For martial artists, it is important to understand that preparing for one thing is not preparing for all things.
• Fights are dangerous. Even when you win, there is a possibility of injury, exposure to bloodborne pathogens such as HIV and hepatitis, or a lawsuit.
• Cardiovascular fitness is extremely important for health and longevity and should be the cornerstone of any fitness regimen, yet fighting for your life is profoundly anaerobic.
• Martial arts and martial artists often try to do it all. They teach self-defense and sparring and street fighting and fitness and personal development, as if they were the same thing. They aren’t even related.
• Self-defense is about recovery. The ideal is to prevent the situation. The optimal mindset is often a conditioned response that requires no though (for the first half-second of the attack) or a focused rage.
• If you can truly flip the switch from surprised, overwhelmed, and terrified to the assault mindset, I can’t teach you much. This is the opposite of the “frozen” response often triggered by a sudden assault, and we train hard to trigger that freeze in others.
• Combat is a very different experience for generals than for soldiers. Generals can look at percentage killed, take risks, sacrifice, and maneuver men. For the generals, there are acceptable losses and you can continue to fight if you suffer twenty percent killed. For the soldier, it is binary: You are alive or you are dead.
• Fitness is objectively the most important effect of martial arts training. The physical skills and self-defense aspects of training will never save as many people from violence as the conditioning will save from early heart attacks.
• If you study Judo, Jujutsu, or Aikido, you will probably never use the skills to throw an attacker, but I can almost guarantee that you will and have used the breakfalls to prevent injury.
• Fitness will never hurt you in a self-defense situation.
• Self-defense is largely about dealing with surprise and fear and pain, none of which is useful in developing fitness.
• People who imagine the harmony of nature are often willfully blind to the savagery between wolf and rabbit. The assault mindset can revel in that savagery.
• The assault mindset in a sporting competition is completely unacceptable. From the assault mindset, if you are scheduled to fight a world champion heavyweight boxer on Thursday, you shoot him on Tuesday.
• Cheating has no meaning in the mind of a predator.
• True predators are unpredictable and that makes the chain of command uncomfortable. They will get the job done but they will ignore any parameter or rule of engagement set by command that does not seem important to them. Because of this, they are idolized in times of serious conflict and marginalized, ignore, or pushed aside when combat is rare.
• The predator mindset is a choice. No one is in that mind at all times--it has too many blind spots to function in normal society.
• Self-defense is never a choice. The attacker is in the predator mindset, not the victim. The victim will have to deal with shock and total surprise, the predator won’t.
• The essence of self-defense is breaking out of the frozen mindset you have been shocked into. If you can access the predator mindset a few seconds into the attack, yo can turn the attack into something else. That’s powerful, but takes great experience.
• Police solutions to military problems are doomed to fail just as military solutions to police problems will never be allowed in a free society.
• Police solutions to military problems are doomed to fail just as military solutions to police problems will never be allowed in a free society.
• Assumptions are those things you believe to be true without really considering them. They provide the background for much or how you see the parts of the world that you have never experienced.
• Assumptions, in a large part of our daily life, are necessary and usually harmless.
• We get into trouble when we base our assumptions on either irrelevant comparison or bad sources.
• Personal experience would seem to be a no-brainer but very, very few people will trust their own experience against the word of either many people or a single “expert”.
• Look at your beliefs, and the source of those beliefs. Some of your beliefs came from early training or bad sources. Some of your sources were chosen because you knew they supported your pre existing point of view. Look very deeply at those sources that you accept without question.
• Violence, for most of us, is unknown territory. Though martial artists have studied “fighting”, and everyone has been raised in a culture where stylized violence is everywhere, very little of what we know is based on experience, and very much is based on word of mouth. It is, for many people, entirely assumption.
• I want to be very clear here. What you have trained in and been taught is “word of mouth”. Until you do it for yourself, for real, you can’t evaluate it with accuracy. Experience in the dojo is experience in the dojo. Experience in the ring is experience in the ring. Experience on the street is experience on the street. There is some overlap in skills; some lessons transfer. But a black belt in Judo will teach you as much about sudden assault as being mugged will teach you about Judo. And my experience will always be your word of mouth.
• If you study a formal martial art, there is another set of assumptions that you must deal with: the assumptions of your style. The first major assumption is a belief in what a “fight” is and looks like. The second is what defines a “win”.
• Most styles and instructors are remarkably well adapted to getting the win in the right kind of fight, and crippled when the fight doesn’t match their expectation or when the conditions of a win change.
• Every style is for something, a collection of tactics and tools to deal with what the founder was afraid of. A style based on the founders fear of losing a non-contact tournament will look different, even if it is just as well-adapted for that idea of a fight as my Jujutsu is for its time and place.
• Understand thoroughly what your style is for. Violence is a very broad category of human interaction. Many, may instructors attempt to apply something designed for a very narrow aspect of violence, such as unarmed dueling, and extrapolate it to other incompatible areas, such as ambush survival.
• Each instructor also has assumptions based on his or her experience, training, and (too often) television and popular culture.
• Some of our assumptions are so closely held that we will cling to them, even in the face of overwhelming evidence. Many, many people discount their own experience as an “aberration”, preferring to trust in “common sense” or tradition or the word of an “expert”.
• Lessons from life are gifts and they should not be ignored.
• One of the reasons that it is hard to find an experienced instructor for real violence is that it is hard to survive enough encounters to learn what worked and what didn’t.
• Do not let yourself be crippled by something that only exists in your mind.
• I like experience. It helps to winnow the BS from the truth.
• But realistically, how many instructors have enough hands-on experience in real violence to pass anything along? Very few. The instructors who have experienced enough violence to be able to generalize are even more rare.
• Additionally, violence is extremely idiosyncratic.
• I was discussing this with one of my students, explaining that unlike almost anything else, the more experience of violence you have the less sure you are that things will work out. Jordan put it in perspective: “Sounds like a case of the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know.”
• Experience, in my opinion, could not give rise to a new martial art. Given the idiosyncratic nature and the improbability of surviving enough high-end encounters, it would be hard to come up with guiding principles or even a core of reliability techniques. I am painfully aware that things that worked in one instant have failed utterly in others.
• Just because something makes perfect sense doesn’t mean it is true.
• Most people don’t recognize the shear chaos of survival fighting or the effects that the stress hormones dumped into your bloodstream will have. Seeing a need for training in this area, instructors have a tendency to look at an area they are familiar with and extrapolate it to violence.
• Things that should work don’t all the time.
• Most people and organizations plan from a “Resources Forward” model. Basically, they look at what they have and figure out what they can do with it. “Goals Backwards” looks at the problem and then creates the resources. “What do I need to do, and what do I need to get to accomplish that?”
• Look at what you need, not what you have. Then you gather what you need instead of trying to stretch resources where they were never meant to go.
• In theory, there is no difference between theory and reality. In reality, there is. Reason, by itself, is only theory.
• Anything that is taught becomes tradition. Even a tradition of questioning traditions. Students have a right to know which of their lessons are based on experience and which on reason.
• Too many people, students of martial arts, concerned citizens, self-defense “experts”, and rookie officers learned most of what they think they know from television, movies, or sports events. The purpose of all of these venues is to entertain , not to educate. What they show has been modified to look more interesting.
• In a lethal fight, one party has the advantage or gets it as early as possible and presses it to the quick, brutal end. It’s fast. There is very little drama.
• In combat sports, three major factors make it difficult to extrapolate from the ring to uncontrolled violence. The most critical and hardest to train for his surprise. [...] The second factor is similar--you know what is likely to happen in a combat sport. [...] Rules and safety considerations are the third factor.
• Real violence is a very broad subject and no two encounters are the same. What is a “win” in one situation may not be in the next. The goal is how you define the win in that particular encounter.
• If the goal changes, so does everything else. If you have only trained for one goal, you will be hampered when the goal is different.
• One of the simplest drills is “Breakthrough” where the student must, as fast as possible, get through a door blocked by two opponents.  Fighting each or both of them takes too long.
• The goal is what needs to happen; parameters are what need to NOT happen, what you can’t do.
• A parameter too few self-defense instructors address is “not getting sued”.
• Goals and parameters combine to dictate strategy. Strategy is the general plan for accomplishing the goal. Fight, run, and hide are the three classic survival strategies.
• The goal of a quick victory and the parameters of minimal casualties (and the real lack of a parameter in cost and material) result in the military strategy of “Shock and Awe”.
• Strategy and environment dictate tactics. Tactics are the “how” of implementing strategy. Environment here is used in a very broad sense. Availability of weapons, targets, escape routes, as well as lighting, footing, and space are all elements of the environment that will affect your choice of tactics, as does the information you have and available time.
• Tactics and the “totality of circumstances” dictate the specific technique you will use. Totality of circumstances (ToC) is the law enforcement term for all of the infinite details of the moment that influence a decision.
• If your goals or parameters change, so does everything else. Different situations require different ways of moving, thinking, and acting. Everything changes. Striving for perfection of a single goal, the hallmark of dojo training, is far too narrow for real life.
• The legal essence of self-defense is that you are required to use “the minimum level of force” which you “reasonably believe” is necessary to safely resolve the situation.
• Knifes and guns, in many places, are interchangeable. Both are considered deadly force.
• Be aware that in many, if not most jurisdictions, even if you do not use it and have no intention of using it as a lethal weapon, it is still legally considered a lethal weapon.
• The minimum level of force will change in the course of an encounter, sometimes every second. If the threat runs or goes unconscious, stop. You’re done. He no longer presents an immediate threat.
• Reasonably believe, simple means, would whatever you did be outside the box for another citizen with similar experience and training?
• Reasonably believe applies to and ties together “minimum level” and “necessary”.
• Some states have a “duty to retreat” clause written into their self-defense laws that required you to exhaust all available options to get out before you fight back.
• To safely resolve: It is not a contest, not a game, and you are under no requirements to play fair or take chances. If you think you might be able to handle it in a wrestling match but you are sure you can handle it with your umbrella, use the umbrella.
• The officer is required to handle situations, not at the level in which he will probably prevail, but at the level where he won’t get hurt.
• In general, defense of yourself or a third person from imminent harm is legally good self-defense. From that point on, you have to look at state laws.
• Lastly, in order to use force, the person you are using it on must be immediate threat, the threat must exhibit and you must be able to clearly articulate three things: intent, means, and opportunity.
• You must be able to clearly explain how you know he was going to hurt you, hurt someone else, kill you, kill someone else, destroy or steal property...whatever the situation you need to resolve.
• Whatever you feel he was going to do, whatever the situation you had to resolve, you have to be able to articulate that he was able to do it.
• If the threat can’t reach you, you can’t argue that he was an immediate threat.
• Be aware that in any classroom or dojo setting, there is a gap between the perceived goal and the real goal. The perceived goal is what you think you are teaching. The real goal, the goal the student strives for never changes: Make the instructor happy.
• Strategy and tactics, assumptions and epistemology are all critical to thinking about violence and preparing for violence. In the moment of sudden attack, however, your brain will change. The way you think will change.
• The OODA loop, described by U.S. Air Force Colonel John Boyd, has become the standard nomenclature for combative decisions-making. In essence, each person must: Observe what is happening; Orient to the observations (interpret the sensory input); Decide what to do about it; and Act.
• In combat or self-defense, the usual problem is to try to get too much information.
• The most fatal decision in an ambush is the “why” question. You won’t get the answer and if you did get an answer, it wouldn’t help you. But many, many victims free right here, with the “why”.
• Decide is the second time waster. Hick’s Law, which states that the more options you have, the longer it takes to choose one. Makes sense. I call this the Brown Belt Syndrome. It’s what happens when you have too many cool ways to win and you get your ass kicked while you are weighing your options.
• One of the goals of training must be to expose yourself to the widest variety of situations possible to prevent this.
• You must be able to act with partial information. You will never have all the answers or know exactly what is going on. People who wait for too much information before acting get hurt.
• The speed of your OODA loop depends on your comfort level of information.
• Most humans fight for status or territory like other animals. Most conflict is about “face” or “respect”, not about necessity. The need to establish a place in the hierarchy of humans is a very powerful drive, one that influences many humans for much of their lives. The fear of being challenged on this basis is also overwhelming and is expressed in many ways.
• This story you tell yourself is something you have built up since birth. In a very real sense, it is your life’s work. The damage to the story can have longer-term effects than damage to the body. The risk to the story, to your self-image, status, and ego can generate far more fear than mere physical risk.
• Humans are apes and we have our own built-in ritual combat to establish social dominance or defend territory. It is nearly always lethal. I call it the Monkey Dance.
• Acting bored and thoughtful can be very powerful. By not questioning your own status, it makes it harder for someone to challenge you for it. There is more, however. Boredom itself is one of the big indicators of confidence, and even status. Whether it is in a boardroom, a job interview, a duel, or a football game, nervousness is the sign of the underdog, the probably loser. The opposite of nervousness can go beyond calm and bored. Powerful.
• The Monkey Dance is based on gaining status and many who play it want a quick back-down with minimal risk. Very few people challenge children, for instance. There is no status to gain. No one plays the Monkey Dance with a crazy person--there is little chance for status, no guarantee of a quick back-down, and crazy people don’t always follow the steps.
• If it’s appropriate, circumvent the Monkey Dance by jumping steps. If the threat is at any level beloved contact and you attack, you will cause him to freeze. The dance is a biological game and it takes a small amount of time to adjust when someone cheats.
• Just be sure that you can articulate intent, means, and opportunity.
• Rarely can anyone make a joint lock work against a strike outside the conditions of a dojo with people trained to strike in a certain and ineffective way.
• The Monkey Dance described here is a male phenomenon. It is very rare in nature for the female of the species to dispute for status and territoriality.
• Remember that the Monkey Dance is biologically designed to be nonlethal. Damage when it occurs is usually cosmetic.
• Women are used to handling men in certain ways, with certain subconscious rules--social ways, not physical ones. These systems are very effective within society and not effective at all when civilization is no longer a factor, such as in a violent assault or rape.
• The Group Monkey Dance (GMD) is another dominance game. In this ritual, members of a group compete for status and to show their loyalty to the group by showing how vicious they can be to someone perceived as an “outsider”. It is purely a contest to prove who is more a part of the group by who can do the most violence to the outsider.
• Violence with a goal beyond domination is not like the Monkey Dance. It more closely mimics the violence between different species.
• In predatory violence, the victim is the resource. The attack is planned, efficient, and safe way for the attacker to get what he wants from that resource.
• Generally, human predators use two distinct strategies to approach and disable their human victims. The blitz attack is the sudden, brutal assault from ambush. The threat will get as close as he can without being noticed or triggering a defensive response and then attempt to overwhelm the victim physically and mentally with a fast, vicious attack. The second attack strategy uses charm and persuasiveness to get close enough and keep the victim off-guard. It then progressives like a blitz, with an overwhelming onslaught.
• For now, think of one key point: People are not charming, it is not an inherited trait. Charm is something people use, a conscious act to get what they want. There are no charming people, only people who use charm.
• Very, very few martial artist have a realistic idea of a predatory attack in their training assumptions.
• The four truths: Assaults happen closer, faster, more suddenly, and with more power than most people believe.
• One of the most common and artificial aspects of modern martial arts training is that self-defense drills are practiced at an optimum distance where the attacker must take at least a half step to contact. Real criminals rarely give this luxury of time. They strike when they are sure of hitting, positive that their victim is well within range before initiating the attack.
• Because the threat has chosen the time, the place, and the victim, he can attack all-out, with no thought given to defense. The speed of this flurry, the constant rain of blows, can be mind numbing.
• An assault is based on the threat assessment of his chances. If he can’t get surprise, he often won’t attack. Some experts say that there is always some intuitive warning. Possibly, but if the warning was noted and heeded, the attack would be prevented. When the attack happens, it is always a surprise.
• The unexpectedness of an attack can negate nearly any skill.
• There is a built-in problem with all training. You want to recycle your partners. If you or your students hit as hard as they can every time they hit, you will quickly run out of students. Truthfully, the average criminal does not hit nearly as hard as a good boxer or karate can hit. They do hit harder than the average boxer or karate has ever felt.
• Skilled technique degrades under stress. It degrades a lot. If you’ve ever heard or said, “If it was for real, I would have done better,” you’ve bought into a huge lie. When the stakes are higher, people do much, much worse than when the pressure is low.
• Complex motor skills, essentially your coordination, will be hampered with a strong enough cocktail. Trapping, combinations, throws--anything that requires hands and feet working together will be gone.
• There is an optimal stage of adrenalization. There is a point, you know it when you feel it, when you are on your game. You’re alert, ready.
• In general, men get a big surge of adrenaline early that dissipates fairly quickly. Women have a much slower build up and a longer cool down time. Hence, a man will be ready to go berserk (or freeze) as soon as the engagements tarts and a woman will be able to think clearly for several minutes before she hits her “deer in the headlights” mode.
• With enough exposure, it is possible to become inured to certain types of violence.
• When someone threatens you but you are pretty confident you can handle it, you’ll get some serious adrenaline but you probably won’t freeze. This is the best of the bad situations.
• In order to train, you will need someone you can trust to be ruthless and unpredictable. The key is to trigger this state so that you can recognize it.
• Experience is no substitute for training. Training is no substitute for experience.
• In the moment, like breaking the freeze, you must force yourself to act. Once a few steps are taken on the new path and you haven’t died, the primitive brain will ease up a bit.
• Violence happens where people get their minds altered. Drugs and alcohol at the most basic level change the way people think and act.
• Violence happens where young men gather in groups. Lots of violence, minor and major, is based on the Monkey Dance or Group Monkey Dance models. The Monkey Dance is primarily a young male phenomenon, as older men have usually established their status. Young men, still struggling to establish status or identify, are extreme risks for MD attacks.
• A reputation for violence is very valuable in establishing status with this group. It does not need to be real ability, just a reputation.
• Violence happens where territories are in dispute. Lots of gang violence, lots of military violence--let’s just call it social violence--happens in places where two or more groups are trying to run things.
• People fight and kill to defend imaginary territory--respect and honor, symbols, membership in a group. They are not fighting to defend their lives but only to defend the way that they see themselves.
• Predatory violence happens in lonely places. Attacks happen where the predator believes he is unlikely to be disturbed and witnesses are rare. A sudden assault with intent to murder, rape, or rob is a planned action. The predator has taken care to choose a place and time that benefit him.
• The first crime scene is where the human predator takes his victims so that he can spend more time and have greater privacy.
• Home invasion crimes have many of the elements of a secondary crime scene. Your home is private and secure, exactly what a predatory criminal may want. In addition, threat against family members can be used as leverage to force cooperation with the predator. This cooperation will not be to the victim’s benefit.
• Whereas predatory assaults happen in lonely places, fishing for victims can happen in crowds. The predator is looking for an easy mark. There are a handful of victim personalities and the predator hunts for them. Using eye contact, body language, and proximity, the predator sees who will back down without eye contact, who will pretend an inappropriate touch didn’t happen, who will try to curry favor with those they see as strong.
• Defending yourself is not an never has been about rights--rights are those things that the civilized members of society agree everyone deserves.
• It’s better to avoid than run; better to run than to de-escalate; better to de-escalate than to fight; better to fight than to die. The very essence of self-defense is a thin list of things that might get you out alive when you are already screwed.
• There is a difference between violence and the threat of violence. That distance is time.
• The threat of violence is a gift, someone communicating to you that they intend or are considering using violence, but they haven’t yet. Someone threatening to hurt you has given you information and precious time. Use that time.
• Use of discretionary time is one of the most valuable concepts in emergency response and one of the hallmark difference between a veteran and a rookie.
• If you have time to plan, even a second, use it.
• There is no good result of a violent criminal wanting to be alone with you.
• Most people--even dangerous, violent people--can’t kill “cold”. They need to work themselves up, need the adrenaline.
• Personalize yourself. It is much harder to kill someone you know than a stranger. If at all possible, make sure the hostage takers know your name and face. If conversations happen, look for common areas of interest, but don’t be phony. The goal is to make it harder to see you as an outsider.
• Do not allow yourself to be tied, handcuffed, or moved to a secondary crime scene. [...] Once you are restrained, you are out of option. When and if it becomes appropriate or necessary to act, you will not be able to.
• Once the violence starts, it is too late to plan. Your options are limited. This is very simple. You either run or fight or hide.
• Making distance is more likely to make someone miss with a handgun than any fancy evasive maneuvers.
• The statistics on misses are encouraging. Most people miss most of the time, even at extremely close range.
• Statistics on survivability are also good. Most people recover fully. Corollary--Do not let your imagination kill you. If you are shot or stabbed, keep running! Do not curl up and die because that’s what you’ve seen on TV.
• Almost all humans have a self-referencing test for effectiveness: if it works on me, it works. This is almost true. If it works on you, it will work on the majority of normal, sane people without drugs or alcohol in their stems who aren’t really scared or really angry.
• To live a criminal lifestyle is to become a skilled exploiter. There is no program so noble, or (as yet) so well-designed, that a skilled exploiter can not only avoid changing, but actually abuse it to become enabling.
• Predators see you as a resource. If they attack, it will be from the greatest advantage they can muster.
• The serial predator is a process predator for whom the act is all important.
• For most true predators, jail is meaningless. It just gives them a different victim pool.
• The unpredictability of the mentally ill is extremely challenging.
• Violence in the past is the strongest indicator of violence in the future: Predators rarely cease to pray.
• If you have the sense to avoid places where violence happens, you should have the sense to avoid violent people.
• In every drill you teach, you must consciously know what the flaw is and make your students aware of it.
• Memorized combinations applied in air almost never work the same way on a body that reacts and resits. The feeling of impact and the feeling of being hit are also missing, which can lead to freezing in a real conflict when it doesn’t feel like you expected.
• Especially with locks and immobilizations, you only transition from bad techniques to good ones. You never transition for the sake of the transition. If the first technique is good, you don’t give it away fro something that might go bad. That’s different for striking, where each technique is a small explosive slice of time, but you get the idea.
• Outside of sport, it is important to practice the crippling techniques.
• Sparring is often a chess match of distance and timing. Assault is an overwhelming onslaught. The skills don’t transfer.
• To recap, assaults happen fast, hard, close, and with surprise.
• Most importantly, the very concept of “fairness” has no place in the discussion of predatory assault. The victim can’t afford to be fair, and the attacker won’t be.
• Condition for a quick, effective response to any unexpected aggressive touch. Trained properly, the counterattack will kick in before the chemical cocktail of stress hormones. This will give one technique at 100%, and possible the initiative, to the exposed victim. This level of conditioning is one of the few training methods that can address the suddenness of an assault.
• Train to flip the switch. Make your students practice going from friendly, distracted, or any other emotion to full-on in an instant.
• Slow-motion training is a valuable tool, but not if students do things in training that they physically can’t do at speed.
• Get used to being hit, and get used to being touched, especially on the face.
• Before anything bad happens, preferably years before, you should become familiar with the legal aspects of self-defense--how much force you can legally use, when you can use it, and when to stop. You also need to work out your moral and ethical issues with regard to violence.
• Learn how to de-escalate someone verbally and learn the warning signs when it is too late to make de-escalation work. And don’t get hung up here--a true predator won’t give you a chance to use this level.
• Optimally, you need to train a small group of counterattacks to sudden assault and train them to reflex speed. This is one of the few things that can derail a predator’s plan. If you have trained it well, this response will kick in before you freeze.
• When you know or believe that the threat has decided to hurt you, you attack. It is the most effective physical defense but takes great skill to use and justify.
• Train yourself to be aware of ambush zones, escape and evasion routes, threat concentrations, etc. The ideal is to not be where the violence is likely to happen.
• Monkey dance violence is predicated on the idea that there is a contest for dominance or social status between two people. If one of them refuses to play the game, pretending to be unaware of the challenge, the situation often evaporates.
• Charm is a verb. People are not charming; charm is something they use to get what they want. When someone attempts to use charm, ask yourself what they want. It might be bad.
• Bad things happen in places. Bad things are done by bad people. If you avoid the bad people and bad places, you usually avoid the bad events.
• If you are ever faced with extreme violence, you will have to make the decision to act. Make it now. You must decide what is worth fighting for, never forgetting that the question involves the risk of both dying and killing. You must decide now.
• Once you have made the list, these are your “Go” buttons. You must commit that if one of them happens you will act ruthlessly and decisively. You cannot second-guess yourself in the moment.
• The Golden Rule of Combat: Your most powerful weapon; Applied to your opponent’s greatest vulnerability; At his time of maximum imbalance.
• Possibly the most overlooked aspect of power generation in the martial arts is one of the most effective: Use a tool. I will take a hickory baseball bat over the hardest fist on Okinawa. A weapon extends reach, increasing power, leverage, and speed.
• Tools are everywhere, limited only by your imagination and experience.
• The most effective unarmed practitioner will consistently lose to a mediocre practitioner who has a weapon.
• Continuous striking is another power multiplier. Be very careful in training not to develop the habit of striking once or twice and then pausing to gauge the effect.
• Attack hard. Attack ferociously. “Violence of action trumps technique.” Hitting hard, fast, and aggressively is more effective than hitting properly. Both are good, but violence of action wins.
• Be cautious with gloves sparring. Gloves encourage closed-fist strikes to the head and real hands tend to break when they do that.
• You must strike hard, fast, and with total commitment.
• There are four combative physical effects you can have on your opponent:
• You can move him, or part of him.
• You can cause pain.
• You can cause damage.
• You can cause shock.
• In self-defense, pain is always an extra, NEVER the primary goal of a technique. Some people can focus through pain. Many threats under the influence of drugs, alcohol, or mental illness are completely immune to pain.
• Damage is destroying structural integrity to the point that all or part of the body is not useable. In your training, be very careful that you understand the difference between pain and damage.
• A broken nose, while fairly painful, is not debilitating in any way. You can keep fighting through it and so could your opponent.
• Cutting off blood supply works on everyone--regardless of drugs, rage, or size--which makes the strangles the big equalizer.
• In the end at the deepest level, successful physical defense will depend on three things: Awareness, Initiative, and Permission.
• Want to change your life forever? Commit right now to never make a half-assed decisions again.
• In combat, if you are aware, you know what needs to be done. Do it. In life, you know what needs to be done, you know the right things to do. Do them.
• Trained people often don’t generalize from skills they have to identical skills.
• In acts of violence, what the world is comes into direct conflict with what we expect the world should be.
• Exposure, especially repeated exposure to extreme violence, will change you. At the best, the fear of death and the decision to fight will clarify in your mind what is worth fighting for and what is worth dying for. That clarity is very powerful. You will realize how any people are attached to ideas and opinions that are meaningless, and how many of the passionate disagreements of your past were largely pointless.
• One of the hardest things for civilians and even researches to grasp is that wears normal people need a reason to lie, criminals need a reason to tell the truth. In a violent, marginal world information is power and disinformation is habit.
• Hopefully, one thing you learned from this book is that technique is not the answer. There is no recipe for survival. The answer is almost always inherent in the problem if you can see it and if you can act.
• I collect old book on Judo and Jujitsu because some of the authors were brutal and knew the line between practice and breaking people. Fairbairn and Applegate are books by two mean who taught people how to survive in the bloodiest war of modern history.
• When you find a nuggets of good information, keep it.