"If you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperilled in a hundred battles... if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperilled in every single battle."- Sun Tzu
When I was at comprehensive school, we had to read this quote out loud every lesson, it was like a mind control, when i recall my memories. However, valuable one!
Yet, I have realised through my own experience as a dancer and as a teacher, this quote is definitely is one of the keys to success in ballet, as well as in life, let me explain, what i mean.
I have began training ballet much later than average dancers, I began my training in ballet age of 17 years old. However, luckily I became a professional ballet dancer. In the process I trained lots, my days and minutes were more concentrated and focused than other students' days and minutes, as I did not think anything but ballet for about ten years since I began my training. And, here is some things I did but but others did not.
1, The amount of hours of training
2, The amount of hours of image training
3, Research
Today, i will focus on number 3, research.
I guess we can call it as an act of education. However, what I did was just watched large amount of ballet videos and any books has a word of "ballet". I did not meant to study or educate myself in ballet, I was just obsessed with it. Yet, even though I was a complete beginner at the time compare to other experienced students, I began to noticed the difference in dancers as I watched so many videos. I realised different dancers dance same piece differently. Then, I started to realise "What is correct/good and what is wrong/bad" . Once I realised this, my progression began to accelerated as only thing I needed to do was to find faults in myself and correct them based on what I know, it is like a process of curving to create a stature from a piece of wood, it is much easier if you have a correct example right next to it.
I also realised same fact when I teach my students. The students whom already educated in ballet and has a correct idea/image improve a lot quicker than the rest of the students who knows how and what to improve.
Another example is my wife. She runs her ballet school and her school is very successful in many ways. One of the reasons are
1, She a clear idea of what she wants/can archive and how to archive.
2, She knows her students and helpers well enough to guide and provide a correct roles for individual student to archive what they want to archive.
3, She research to find a way to archive what she want to archive in a most efficient way she can.
If you wish to improve more, if you struggle to improve in what you do or generally in life, why don't you try write down what you want to archive and how. I also recommend to watch and read large amount of videos and books about your interest to sharpen your knowledge and find out why you liked it, what you liked about it and what you need to do to archive to what you liked.
And, that is a short cut to success.