Fall Down 7 Times, Get Up 8 Times: Judo, Life and Failure

By: Michael Oshima

There is a saying in Japanese:

七転び八起き(Fall down 7 times, get up 8 times.)

This is something you think about a lot in judo, and that’s because the first thing you learn in judo is how to fall. For those of you unfamiliar with judo, here’s why:

Does it hurt the first time you fall? Yeah. It does. It hurts. The second time, too. The third, a bit less. Still, it hurts. But you learn. You learn how to fall safely. I’m not saying it’s painless — gravity still compels us towards the center of this fantastic planet, which happens to be towards the floor, and the floor is still hard.

This could be taken as discouraging, learning very early on that you should expect to be falling so much. There’s no getting around it: you will fall, a lot. But if you keep getting up, and keep the above saying in mind, there is so much to be learned.

You get used to falling.

You know that it’s going to happen, and you cease to be surprised by it every time. You learn that falling is not nearly as scary as you thought. Getting over that fear is empowering. Once you realize that you can just get yourself up after a fall, you find yourself much more liberated to try new and interesting techniques and tactics — things you would never have tried were you still so afraid of falling.

You get better at falling.

Now that’s an interesting concept, right? You’ll actually get better at falling. You’ll sense a fall coming, and be able to relax enough to make it safe, because you learn that being overly tense leads to injuries. You’ll become able to recognize that you’re falling at a strange angle, and adjust, or that you’re falling too fast, and try to slow yourself down somehow. You find that bouncing back up after a fall actually gets easier and easier.

Falling becomes just another part of the process.

Once you’re not worried about falling, and barely have to think about it, you start thinking about bigger questions. Why did I fall that time? How can I avoid whatever led me to falling that time? How am I most likely to fall? What can I improve so I don’t fall so hard next time? Learning to fall is just the first step.

There will always be more falls.

No matter how good you are at judo, there will be more falls. Maybe not as hard, but there will be more, and they will become less and less of a reason to stop doing judo. You’ll learn to continue no matter how many times you fall. I always tell my students: I’m a black belt not because I’ve thrown more people than you, but because I’ve fallen 1,000 times more than you.

Thinly veiled metaphors for failure make it easier to talk about.

Ahem.

And lastly: details matter. 

I swear the saying at the beginning of this post is actually the real saying, but go back and read it again. It doesn’t actually make any sense. If you fall down 7 times, you only have to get up 7 times, and you’re back on your feet. Don’t blindly accept sayings just because they’re supposedly ancient and written in a different language.

I’ve been doing judo for 20 years now, and the things I’ve learned on the mat inform every other pursuit in my life, personal and professional. I hope that at least one of these well-organized bullets can help you with something. Go forth and fall — or fail, however you want to spell it.

Extra lesson: these cute little girls doing judo are totes adorbs.