Miyamoto Musashi
No favourite weapon
Do not fall in love with a tool
The Book of Five Rings, Earth Scroll; the Dokkodo
A swordsman who never lost a bout wrote down a rule against loving your sword. This is about why he bothered.
What actually happened?
In the Earth Scroll he sets down a rule of his own: you should not have a favourite weapon. Leaning too hard on one is the same error as not knowing how to use it. A long blade has long-blade weaknesses and a short one has short-blade weaknesses, and neither deserves attachment. He is his own evidence. At Ganryujima his opponent Sasaki Kojiro carried a famous long sword; Musashi came ashore with a wooden one cut from a boat oar. Late in life, in the Dokkodo, he wrote twenty-one vows for himself. One of them: in all things whatsoever, rely on nothing.
Affection for a tool ends by defining you
Favour one weapon and your method quietly grows around it, until the tool is choosing which fights you can take rather than the other way round. Dropping the attachment is not a claim that the tool is bad. It is a refusal to let one object mark your edge.
The engineer who knows one framework, the team that only knows paid acquisition. First it reads as expertise; three years on it is the only shape of work they can take.
Long loses one way, short loses another
He never says which blade is better. He says each has a bout it must lose. Tools carry no absolute rank, only a fit with the situation, so what you train is not one weapon taken to its limit but the reading of which one this round needs.
Heavy process protects a large programme and shackles a team of three. Flat structure runs the other way. Any outfit with a creed will keep it in the wrong place.
The oar won by being off the scale
Kojiro's long sword was a named blade and the centre of everything he did. The wooden one Musashi carved was longer still and belonged to no school anyone could read. Beating a man on the parameter he is proudest of turns years of his training into a liability.
If their strength is response time, open where their response process does not reach. The stronger the strength, the slower the turn.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: you have a tool or a method you handle better than anything else and never think of changing.
Ask first: what does the bout this thing has to lose look like, and am I standing in it right now?
Where it goes wrong: reading rely on nothing as being half good at everything; and switching tools for novelty rather than because the situation changed.
Lines to keep
Do not have a favourite weapon.
Over-familiarity with one weapon is as much a fault as not knowing it.
In all things whatsoever, rely on nothing.
Same situation, other people are asking
The playbook everyone hands me was written for a different situation.I am expert in one tool and it has started choosing my work.I only know one way to do this · all 2 questions →If this one named what you are going through,
send it to someone who needs it, or keep it somewhere you will find it again.