Skills And Social Circles

Wanted to share with you a conversation I had with Dan Evans at Krump Pow a few weeks ago.

Regardless of whether its the best move to make, we as a community give more credence to the opinions of top performers. If the question was just, “How do I win sword fights?”, then that wouldn’t be an issue. It turns out, though, that when the question is, “How should we shape our community?” the people we’re most likely to listen to are the folks winning tournaments.

This isn’t unique to the historical fencing. It’s something we see in any skills-based community. There’s a fantastic article from a few years back talking about the culture at circus schools, and its the same exact story. If you show up somewhere new being able to do a triple layout, you get ushered to the center of the social circle at light speed. Your ability to do a bunch of flips doesn’t mean you know anything about being a good administrator, it doesn’t mean you necessarily know anything about how to recruit new students, and it doesn’t mean you come in knowing how to build a community where people can feel safe to be themselves.

A few years back, work took me out of town for a few months. After getting settled, I went and found the local fencing practice with a plan in mind.

Week 1: Don’t let anyone land a single shot on me.

Week 2: Ask people what they would like to learn.

The plan worked.

Now, the locals were all incredibly nice folk and I’m sure I would have been welcomed in regardless of my skill level. Being invited to sit with everybody at dinner that night, being told who was who on the local scene, and being invited to people’s houses likely wouldn’t have happened at that same speed had I shown up as a middling fencer.

Sure, you can be skilled and still make enemies. If you roll in somewhere new and start putting everybody down day one, it doesn’t matter if you won all of your passes. People are going to see you for the asshole you are and treat you as such. But if you show up and are generally easy to get along with, people will go out of their way to talk to you way more if you come in at the top end of the bell curve.

This isn’t a phenomenon that’s going away and I don’t suppose my little article here is going to reset the entire social dynamic of skills-based communities. Instead, I’d like to borrow from my local improv scene and say, “Yes, and.”

It takes a lot of hands to make the show run and there are plenty of roles to go around. At my local practice I have personally pivoted towards taking C and B level fencers and doing what I can to bring them up to an A. In doing that, I’ve intentionally made space for that mid range to get experience teaching by working with the new fencers coming in the door.

I remember a time, right before work took me out of town for awhile, where I had an identity crisis at my local practice. I wanted so badly to try and have an identity that was mine at practice, to have something that people would come to me for instead of just treating me as the second best option and only going to me whenever #1 was busy. At first I thought I would try and be the Giganti guy at practice, but with my maestro there having taught me all I knew, who was going to go up to me? Then I thought, maybe I’ll be the sword and buckler guy. But then I quickly realized that there were two other people at my practice who’s understanding of sword and buckler was miles beyond my own. The answer I ended up landing on was to, at least at my local practice, carve myself out a niche as the longsword guy. It wasn’t something anyone else at my practice was taking all that seriously and knowing I’d be away for a few months, I decided to dive in to the material on my own in order to come back at the end of the season with something that I could be the go-to for. The result, years later, ended up being my debut book, Bolognese Longsword: For The Modern Practitioner.

However, diving into countless hours of self study in order to emerge the local expert on a subject isn’t something all that scalable. If everyone at your practice who sticks around past those first few months is off studying their own thing, using an entirely different sword than everybody else, your practice just isn’t going to be able to grow. Sure, I’m all for having a diversity of disciplines at your local practice. The fact that just with rapier I can face off against people doing Capoferro, Giganti, Fabris, Pacheco, and Meyer all in the same week has definitely helped me be able to better problem solve when I run across something unexpected at a tournament. Same goes for being able to square off against longsworders doing Fiore, the Anonimo Bolognese, and RDL. At a certain point, though, we are going to run out of texts to study.

Instead, I’d like to propose something much more manageable. Oh, and if you’re the top level tournament fencer at your practice who’s been given the reigns, then I’d like for you to pay extra special attention. Figure out what relevant skills people at your practice have and then give them the mic when their topic gets brought up.

For example, while I have a pretty solid understanding of the fundamentals across the board, one of my students excels at winning her fights by just out-structuring her opponents. She’s not necessarily beefier than everybody else, she just has a highly attuned sense of mechanical advantage that she uses to make me retreat as fast as possible going, “Oh fuck” every single week. Sure, I can teach structure just fine, I was in fact the one who taught it to her, but there’s plenty of other topics I can cover better so if someone has a structure question, I’m more than happy to send them her way.

I’ve also got a dear friend at my local practice who’s day job is being a therapist. I’m really bad at setting tournament goals for myself besides, “get out of my pool” or just, “win everything”. Those aren’t particularly helpful for most folks, though, as at the end of the day only one person in the tournament gets to go home as the winner. So instead of watching me flounder about trying to help people set realistic, achievable goals, I’ll just send folks to the trained psychologist standing right next to me.

Finally, I have a friend who’s been dealt a bad hand when it comes to their health and as a result, they haven’t been able to fight much the past several years. At the same time, they are my #1 choice when it comes to running events. They’re not just on top of everything, planning everything out months in advance. No, they’re even better than that. Every time they’re in charge of making the gears turn and I go, “Hey, I could really use…”, the problem somehow gets magically solved without me ever seeing it happen. I know it was them, and I know it got solved. I just can’t ever see how they pulled it off and despite the number of emails I have sent to the council of magicians, I have yet to receive a response.

It takes all of these people to make the show happen. Sure, the audience might only walk away remembering the star performer, but they don’t get to stand on that podium without everyone else pitching in. Just because someone might excel in one area, does not mean that their voice should inherently carry any extra weight in another. So the next time you want to see something changed in your community, feel free to go up to the person who won the tournament that day in order to help amplify your voice. Just don’t forget that they might not be the best person for each and every job.