The hunchback who caught cicadas

Confucius was passing through the forest at Chu when he saw a hunchback catching cicadas on a pole. The man took them the way you'd pick something up off a table.

Confucius asked if he had some technique.

The man said yes. For five or six months I practise balancing two balls on top of the pole without dropping them. Then I lose very few cicadas. Three balls, and I miss one in ten. Five balls, and it's like picking them up.

Then he said something that's been repeated by every serious craftsman since. I plant my body like a stump. I hold my arm like a dead branch. Heaven and earth are vast, and the ten thousand things are many, but I know nothing of them except the wings of the cicada. I don't turn, I don't blink. What could compete with that?

That isn't mysticism and it isn't talent. It's subtraction, done for months, on purpose, in an unglamorous way.

Attention is the only resource you can train that also trains everything else. It's also the one most people never practise directly, because it's boring and it doesn't look like progress.

MOJOWAY is built around one dedicated conversation, one client, one pattern at a time. Depth comes from the narrowing, and the narrowing is a skill you can actually get better at.