Alvin Soon

It was supposed to be easy. I’d been training for years: drills, sparring, conditioning. He’d just started. This would be a light match.

But a glancing blow hit like a hammer to my ribs. My knees buckled. I couldn’t move. My friends stopped the match before it’d barely begun. My face burned, but not from the pain.

It’s one thing to lose. It’s another to lose to someone who shouldn’t beat you. At sixteen, I believed that effort guaranteed results. But not that day.

“You need skill and luck in a fight,” my sensei told me later. “The more you have of one, the less you need of the other.” He was talking about fighting, but over time, I realised how much it applied everywhere else.

There’s this idea that meritocracy, in which people succeed based on their merit, promises fairness. But the word was first meant as warning, because the world is unfair and success rests on many things outside of our control.

Some who believe in meritocracy become cruel. Having succeeded themselves, they believe that others’ failures prove weakness. Others fail and become bitter, convinced that any effort is a waste of time.

But a few find something else: they marry striving with kindness¹. They decouple blame from failure and superiority from success, because success is not always proof of merit, and failure is not always a personal fault. There is skill and there is luck.

I used to think that lost match was my failure. Now I see it was a teacher. When I could breathe again, I stood and walked off the mat. The next day, I went back to training.