Forms Don't Hit Back

On avoidance, 切磋琢磨, and choosing to step back in

Jeremy’s punch went straight past my guard and caught me in the face. Clean. The ref stepped in (for the second time) and reminded us both that this was point sparring. Ease off the force, or she’d start awarding penalty points to the opponent.

Jeremy nodded politely, the way you do when you have thirty pounds and six years of kickboxing on someone and the ref is asking you to be gentler. We reset, and he came in again. I tried to counter, and he scored again.

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A year earlier, I’d broken my toe at a kung fu tournament. I spent most of the next year telling myself I’d get back to sparring once it healed.

I didn’t. A few months back, I signed up for forms and weapons instead. I told myself it was strategic - that I should compete where I was strongest. The logic was sound, but I was lying to myself. I’d broken the toe performing a form — a stomp delivered with a little too much enthusiasm. Choreography.

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A friend of mine is the kind of person who can say things you don’t want to hear. We were talking about training, and I mentioned I’d been competing in forms. “That’s just dancing,” he said. “Sparring is combat. Startups are combat.”

His comment stung; it felt dismissive of years of disciplined practice. The precision of a form, the hours of repetition, the way your body learns to move without your mind getting in the way. None of that is trivial.

But he was right, and he’d earned the right to say it. We’d built a successful business together years ago, and his directness was part of what made the partnership work. He was being accurate, which can be worse than being cruel.

Forms don’t hit back. Neither do product sprints, incubator sessions, or pitch competitions. A founder can stay busy for months in that cycle (building, rehearsing, polishing the deck) and call it progress. And it is progress, the same way forms are progress. You’re getting sharper. You’re still warming up.

The night before his comment, I’d been at a tech meetup where people were demonstrating AI coding agents for non-coding work. One by one, people showed what they’d built, got challenged on it, and walked away sharper than when they arrived. The audience learned too. That’s a real form of improvement, and I left feeling energized by it. Community sharpening. Everyone helping each other get better. A good first step, and still softer than what his comment was pointing at. The kind of growth he was describing requires someone on the other side actively trying to win.

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His comment stayed with me longer than I expected. I kept circling back to the question underneath: was I avoiding the thing that would actually teach me something?

So I signed up for sparring again, this time a Spring Invitational, hosted by our sister club. Familiar faces, a competitive, warm atmosphere, and a bracket that would put me across from people who’d been doing this longer than me.

Over the next thirty days, I fought in two tournaments and one grading. The opponents got harder. The contact got more real. Sparring is nothing like forms. It’s messy, reactive, alive. You can train, but you can’t rehearse. You can only show up and respond.

It reminded me of the first time I tried to sell a product to someone who hadn’t already agreed to be nice about it. The buying signals (or, more often, the not-buying signals) arrived fast and without cushioning. A prospect’s silence after your demo hits different than a mentor’s encouragement after a practice pitch. Both are feedback. Only one of them is combat. Selling a company was combat too. Months of it, with higher stakes and less control than any tournament I’ve entered.

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Over the past month, the results have been slow and direct. My first tournament back: no medal. The second: a bronze. The third: a gold, in a smaller division. Each one taught me something the last one couldn’t, and the feedback was immediate in a way you can’t fake or filter. Forms are a conversation with yourself. Sparring is a conversation with someone who is actively trying to make things difficult for you.

Which brought me back to Jeremy’s fist.

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There’s a Chinese expression: 切磋琢磨 (qiēcuō zhuómó). It literally describes the ancient craft of working raw material — cutting, filing, carving, polishing. Bone into something useful. Jade into something beautiful. In everyday Mandarin it’s often shortened to just 切磋 (qiēcuō), meaning “to exchange notes” or “to discuss,” which makes it sound polite, almost academic. The full version keeps all four verbs. It remembers that refinement takes pressure, abrasion, and repeated contact.

Some readers might reach for “iron sharpens iron,” and the spirit is close. The difference is in what each image assumes. Iron sharpening iron is two equal, identical things grinding against each other. 切磋琢磨 starts with raw, uneven material and accounts for the whole meticulous process: the rough cuts, the careful filing, the final polish. It assumes the work is long and the materials are different. That felt closer to what I’d been experiencing.

That’s what Jeremy was doing when he hit me. That’s what my tournament opponents were doing when they pressed me harder than I was ready for. It’s what my friend was doing when he called my forms “dancing.”

Combat is rarely fair. Jeremy had thirty pounds on me and years of experience I couldn’t close in a single match. Fairness was never the point — contact was. Startups taught me that long before sparring did. The investor across the table has the capital, the pattern-matching, and the leverage; you have a slide deck and conviction. Negotiating with a strategic partner who could buy your entire company with their Q3 marketing budget is the same kind of mismatch. You show up anyway, because the alternative is practicing alone in a room where nothing hits back and nothing changes.

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After the matches, there’s a thing that happens. You shake hands with the person who just spent three minutes trying to take your head off, and there’s a warmth there that’s hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t felt it. You respect them more than you did before the match. You look forward to seeing them at the next tournament.

The people who hit you are the ones helping you improve. That’s 切磋琢磨: refinement that only works because both people show up willing to be changed by it.

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This weekend is the “big trophy” tournament. Bigger divisions, harder opponents, the kind of event where the contact gets real. It’s the same tournament where I broke my toe last year.

I don’t know what the results will be. But I know I’ll walk out sharper than I walked in.

I’ll step in again.

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A Note on Practice

My wife introduced me to 切磋琢磨. She was telling me about wuxia movies where one kung fu master approaches another and says “切磋, 切磋” as an invitation to spar and learn from each other. The whole essay clicked into place after that conversation. Sometimes the right frame for an idea doesn’t exist in the language you’re writing in.

This one goes live before the big trophy tournament this weekend. I thought about waiting for results, but decided I liked it better this way.

If you know someone who’s been quietly avoiding their version of the ring, I’d appreciate you sending this their way.

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In the Margin

Here are a few things this piece kept brushing up against. I’m sharing in case you find them interesting as well.

1. Rory Miller, Meditations on Violence (2008) Rory Miller spent years as a corrections officer and martial artist studying the gap between training and real contact, and his central argument is essentially “forms don’t hit back” at book length.

2. K. Anders Ericsson, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise (2016): Ericsson’s deliberate practice framework emphasizes structured, coached repetition as the path to mastery, which makes it an interesting counterpoint to this essay’s argument that at some point, practice has to give way to contact you can’t control.

3. David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World (2019): Epstein distinguishes between “kind” learning environments (predictable, rule-bound) and “wicked” ones (uncertain, novel), and his case that the most adaptable learners seek out messy, cross-domain challenge maps directly onto “you can train, but you can’t rehearse.”

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What I’m Reading

Recent books and articles I’ve enjoyed and recommend

• Book: Shaolin Spirit: The Way to Self-Mastery

• Substack: Letting Bots Learn to Move Like Players

• Substack: Who Forged Imperial Japan and Remade Modern China