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 effort guaranteed results. But the equation broke that day.

“You need skill and luck in a fight,” my sensei taught me later. “The more you have of one, the less you need of the other.” At the time, I thought he was talking about fighting. Now I understand he was talking about living.

I’d thought of hard work as armour. Kneeling there on the floor, I glimpsed a break in that belief. Meritocracy promises fairness, but the word was originally meant as warning. In theory, it rewards effort. In practice, it forgets that there are things beyond our control.

Some people become cruel, believing that failure proves weakness. Others become bitter, convinced that effort is a lie. A few find something deeper: they marry striving with kindness¹. They learn to decouple failure from blame and success from superiority, because success is not always proof, and failure is not always fault.

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