It was 1997 when I heard the most god-awful noise one can hear, the sound of an eighties-era alarm clock going off at full volume. I quickly slammed my hand on the button to turn it off and got out of bed. I went through my normal morning routine to get ready for school. Something seemed off though from the second I woke up. I didn’t put much thought into it as I drove to school.

The drive to school gave me even more of a bad gut feeling. Almost ominous. The traffic just wasn’t the same. Then I pulled into the school’s parking lot, and it got even weirder. Normally the parking lot is swarming with students arriving. There wasn’t a soul in sight. Students’ cars parked, yes. But there was no one walking into the school as usual. I glanced down at my watch thinking I was late. But no, I was there at the exact same time I normally arrived.

I continued on into the school. Again, oddness. The forum, where all the students hung out until the first bell, was empty. I was perplexed. I walked towards my locker, and on the way I checked the school’s clock. Maybe my watch was off? But no, the time was correct. Yet no students to be seen. It was starting to feel like an episode of the twilight zone.

I grabbed my books for my first period class and walked toward the room. As I approached the room, I could see into class through the doors window. Everyone was in class! I again walked back to the school clock to triple check the time. It showed I was on time. I was starting to think I was losing my mind. I then proceeded to walk towards the office to talk to the secretary.

As I stood there in front of the office window, I saw the secretary sitting there as she looked up at me. “Hi Dan! What can I do you for?” As I was trying to figure out what question to ask to figure out what was going on, I noticed the digital clock on her desk. That’s when it all made sense.

If you’ve taken my classes for any extended period, you know my clocks are wrong half of the year. Not the minute hand, the hour. When we have a time change, I rarely ever change my clock. It’s not hard, I just don’t care as I only ever look at the minute and second hand as my days are planned out to the minute. I already know the hour. And due to this, I never looked at the hour hand on any of the clocks. I only looked at the minute hand. I had woken up exactly one hour late that morning. And since the minute hand was always in line with my normal routine, it never dawned on me to look at the hour hand.

To make matters worse, I had the same teacher for first and second periods. She immediately wrote up a detention slip for me. I had not gotten detention in high school before and didn’t know the rules. I had baseball practice right after school. Instead of going to detention, I went to practice and told my coach I’d be late to practice the next day as I got detention. Little did I know that you had to go to detention that same day you received it. And not showing up to detention meant having to serve in the dreaded Saturday school.

If you’ve never been to Saturday school, it’s nothing like the movie “the Breakfast Club”, as I had hoped. And this too, I didn’t know the rules and was late arriving at Saturday school as my friend stated the time started whenever you arrived. Implying to me that I could show up at any time. And I made it even worse by arriving with no study materials. Needless to say, the teacher in charge of Saturday school was NOT happy with me. I spent the entire four hours there when it should have been an hour. This, of course, led me to be late for a Saturday baseball game, and promptly sitting the bench.

I know, I sound like an idiot for not looking at the hour hand. But how did I sleep exactly one hour through the most ear-piercing alarm clock on the planet? I’m still perplexed by that part. The rest was just going through the motions until I realized my error. Followed by more errors, of course.

This one little, seemingly insignificant, mistake led to a disastrous few days and sitting the bench during a game. Not the end of the world, but for a teenager, it was soul crushing. How can such a small detail create such a huge effect down the line? This is life though. It’s known as the Butterfly Effect. In theory, a butterfly flapping its’ wings can eventually cause a Tsunami on the other side of the world due to numerous chain reactions.

These tiny details matter. What we do right now matters. Every action, or non-action. History is littered with seemingly insignificant actions leading to massive disastrous actions or world changing positive actions. For instance, a driver making the wrong turn down the wrong road was essentially the catalyst to starting World War I. Or, on the opposite end of things, how Alexander Fleming accidentally discovered that Penicillin kills bacteria, leading to it being used for medical treatments that have saved countless lives since its discovery.

These little things matter. I talk to my students all the time about the details of their technique. I know it falls on deaf ears at times as their technique seems to be working currently. But what gets missed is that everything builds off everything else. Take for instance the round kick. The most common mistake for newer students is that they don’t fully turn their hips over when throwing the kick. This leads the kick to go in an upward trajectory.

When it hits a bag or target, it sounds and looks like it hit hard and “worked” well. But if I move that target and they miss landing that kick, what do you think happens? That heavy leg that is in a fast and powerful upward trajectory doesn’t have a Newtonian force to stop it and help regain your balance. Therefore, it keeps going up, up, up until you go down, down, down, right on your butt. The last place you want to be if someone is sparring you or worse, attacking you. Unlike those heavy bags, humans don’t like being hit and try and move out of the way as often as possible when a kick is coming.

These are the little details that get missed in training. There is so much depth to each and every technique we learn that it’s seemingly never-ending. The way I teach a beginner student is to set up how we will adjust and advance that same technique in the intermediate ranks, which in turn gets adjusted again at the advanced ranks. This continues even past black belt.

A simple wrist lock at white belt that doesn’t seem overly useful at the time, suddenly is one of the most used techniques in your arsenal as a black belt once the adjustments and advancements are accomplished. You may be asking, “why not just teach the advanced version immediately?” It’s an understandable question. But it just doesn’t work that way. We learn to crawl before we walk. And we learn to walk before we run. One must trust the process.

It’s far too easy to get lost in the details and forget the goal. Giving a student too many details and too many things to think about too soon just results in frustration. As an instructor, the frustration can come from students not applying the small details or quitting before getting to the next level of advancement where that technique starts to become very useful. But that’s just a part of teaching. Some will get it and trust everything an instructor tells them when it comes to their training, others will second guess everything or simply not listen as they feel their way is working well enough.

The biggest advice I can give to students is to trust your instructor and the process. If you’re hesitant to trust the instructor early on, that’s understandable. Ask questions for clarification instead. The instructor should be able to clearly explain or demonstrate the process and end result. In time, trust will be built.

One should place all effort into their journey. Focus on the details your instructor tells you to focus on but don’t lose sight of the goals that you are working towards. The traditional martial arts are a lifelong journey of discovery. There is no end to that journey unless you end it yourself, just milestones to accomplish over time. Everything builds on everything else. But those tiny insignificant details slowly snowball into massive adjustments and improvements over time.

It’s easy to overlook these details, but that always ends with the student hitting a wall down the road trying to make a technique work that just won’t work until they go back and refine that technique. It’s also why I don’t advance students easily. I know what will happen if that detail is overlooked, and it’s never a good outcome. And don’t forget to look at the hour hand of a clock when the world seems a little off.