There Are No Secrets: Thoughts On Shortcuts

Chop wood, carry water.

Photo by Fabrizio Chiagano on Unsplash

This is going to be a little more personal than some of the stuff I usually write, which is generally about watches (although someone said to me a while ago that they thought I was “using writing about watches to write about things you’re actually interested in,” which is as the expression goes, a fair cop, although not always totally accurate). The impetus behind this story was a recollection I had, recently, of a conversation I had with someone I once worked with, quite some time ago and this person said, “We’ve got to figure out the secret sauce behind what makes you guys so successful!” I was taken aback and said, “There is no secret sauce. You wanna know what the secret sauce is? We do what we do more often and usually better than the competition. There’s no fucking secret sauce.”

The notion that there was or that there is, is a manifestation of another flaw in reasoning which I have seen plague one group after another (could be a company, could be any other organization but the basic problem is the same). This flaw in reasoning is the belief that there is, somewhere out there, that One Big Idea which if only you can uncover it, is the Key To Success And The Possession Of All Worldly Treasures. This can take the form of belief in some deceptively glamorous organizing principle, but it can also take the form of believing that there is out there some magical person – often but not always an expensive external consultant with a sharp line of patter and a glib mastery of flattering the right people – who can if brought on board, somehow save us from ourselves. The Secret Sauce in human form, you might say.

The first time I ran into this problem was right after moving to New York in the mid-1980s, when I had no idea what to do with myself and ended up working, for a year or so, with a choreographer whose husband practiced Aikido. Aikido is a bit of an oddball in the modern martial arts world inasmuch as it focuses on concepts you wouldn’t think to find in a martial art, including notions of spiritual harmony with the opponent and the world in general, stemming from the founder, Morihei Ueshiba, who was an ardent practitioner of various forms of esoteric meditation. (This side of him was in contrast to his younger years in the martial arts, when he studied, among other things, an especially rough and ready, highly practical jujitsu system called Daito-Ryu).

Describing Aikido is next to impossible because since the founder’s death in 1969, the Aikido diaspora has produced a plethora of styles, all of which have their own particular take on what O Sensei, as Ueshiba was and is called, taught. Eventually I’d go on to also study taijiquan (usually Romanized as tai chi chuan) and xingyiquan (hsing-i).

What all three of these systems had in common was a preoccupation with the idea that there were certain secrets which you would only be introduced to under the appropriate circumstances and if you were thought to be up to the necessary standard. Generally speaking progression through the ranks often involved ponying up some dough-re-mi as well. Now these are both defensible strategies, up to a point – I remember my xingyi teacher saying that people used to bug his sifu all the time for “secrets” and if the sifu really wanted to get someone out of his hair, he’d do what the supplicant asked, and show them complicated techniques for which they did not have the necessary foundation, which would essentially close them off forever from making any real progress.

This seems a little sadistic but I took the point, which was that you had to, you might say, squeeze a lot of oranges to get any juice – you had to work hard, tolerate frustration (the apropos expression in Chinese is, “eat bitter”) and go through an awful lot of boredom as a way of building the frustration tolerance necessary to make any progress. I had the same experience with my taijiquan teacher. Taijiquan and xingyi don’t have a tremendous lot in common (plus, the xingyi I studied was, as my teacher liked to say, “weird” even by xingyi standards) but one common element was the use of standing meditation practice to build a good root to the ground and do a bunch of other things too. Standing meditation is a nice sounding euphemism for holding certain physical positions for extended periods of time, sometimes with specific breathing going on and sometimes not. What they all had in common was that you had to put up with quite a lot of physical discomfort. At one point my taji teacher’s advanced class consisted of a bunch of us standing in one position for half an hour. He was a fan of the TV show Golden Girls (you can’t make this stuff up) and class such as it was consisted of him giving us a position to hold, watching an episode, coming out and changing the position, and watching another episode (they were reruns). Lather, rinse repeat.

What we did notice after a while, though, were results. Now arguably you could say that the “secret” here is that standing is the key, core practice that underlies the acquisition of any other ability in the art, but it’s not a very hard secret to keep because standing meditation is a royal pain in the ass. As far as the money business is concerned, the truth is that running a martial arts school in Manhattan – or really, anywhere – is an expensive proposition. At least back then – I don’t know, maybe things are different now but I don’t think they are – most martial arts schools struggle to make rent every month. The days when you could find a few thousand square feet of unused factory space in a sketchy neighborhood are long gone. But there was also a lot of tomfoolery around the notion of “secrets” which often would only get passed on in expensive seminars, and which were built around a certain amount of cult of personality. I remember attending one and being warned – seriously warned – not to stand in front of the teacher’s outstretched hand and open palm, presumably because he was emitting death rays or something.

“What can I tell you? A master is a master. He came in here on one leg and kicked everybody’s ass.”

In stark contrast to all of this was one of the teachers at the Aikido dojo. He was a guy named Seichi Sugano sensei, and his classes were … well, it’s hard to describe. Most of the sensei had readily identifiable idiosyncrasies in their expression of Aikido (which is also fine, everybody’s Aikido is different) – one, for instance, would be known for their powerful joint locks, another for their graceful and athletic breakfalls, yet another for their mechanically efficient technique.

The weird thing about Sugano Sensei is that he never seemed to be doing anything. You could say, I guess, that when he was doing Aikido there was no difference between his presence on the mat, and off; you could say that there was no Sugano Sensei there, somehow, when he was doing Aikido. Both of those are partly true but both are also ultimately unsuccessful approximations, like trying to describe seeing The Band take the stage at Woodstock … you had to be there, man. Later I found out that he’d spent a lot of time meditating and that he really enjoyed exploring other martial skills, including target shooting and Western fencing. He also dismissed a lot of the anecdotes about the seemingly magical skills some martial artists were supposed to have (he said, in an interview from 1996, that there were a lot of stories going around about O Sensei that were “hard to believe.”)

Sugano Sensei had diabetes and long after I’d stopped studying Aikido I heard that he’d had a leg amputated below the knee, despite which he kept teaching. Even later I heard that he’d died.

Sometime afterwards, I briefly studied European sword fighting – not modern sport fencing; the school taught a rare style of Renaissance-era swordplay of the Spanish school. I was talking to the teacher one night about my previous martial arts experience and it turned out that Sugano Sensei had been through there, years before. I asked the teacher what that was like and the teacher shrugged and said, “What can I tell you? A master is a master. He came in here on one leg and kicked everybody’s ass.”

I guess part of the reason I’m bringing this up, in this context, is because the whole idea that there’s some “secret sauce,” or some ideology which if you can just codify it, is the key to success, is something I’ve seen a lot of in the watch world over the years. I don’t think that having a sense of tactical and strategic goals is a bad thing but I have also met a lot of people who sold themselves to leaders, and leaders who sold themselves to investors, as wizards of branding (or what have you) and I’ve seen lots of Big Ideas (in human and also in intangible form) ranging from a belief in broad-strokes concepts that never actually put rubber to the road, to an obsession with SEO, and everything in between. The thing that I think is easy to forget is that like I said up top, there is no secret sauce (I don’t think there is, anyway … your mileage may vary). Our job is not to make watches interesting, or figure out some cute trick for making watches interesting. Our job is to be interested in watches and if you’re not, you’re in the wrong business.

I will close with one more anecdote because at a certain point in a man’s life, he feels entitled to become preachy and avuncular. One of my favorite American novelists, who I don’t think is read all that much anymore, is John Gardner (whose Grendel is still one of my favorite books of all time, especially for his description of the dragon, which reminds me of more than one collector I’ve known). Gardner used to teach creative writing at – well at a bunch of places, one of which was my alma mater, Bennington. The story as I’ve heard it, goes that one day, Gardner was approached by a young would-be writer, who with some trepidation, said to the great man, something like, “Professor Gardner, you’ve been reading my stuff. I have to ask you, and please be honest with me: Do you think I have what it takes to be a writer?” Supposedly, Gardner looked him for a second and then said, completely seriously, with no irony at all, “Uh, well … I don’t know. Do you like sentences?”

The notion that you need to find the material intrinsically interesting as a prerequisite to achieving consistent quality is a powerful one, and if anyone is interested in hitching their wagon to a Big Idea, I would hope it would be that one. You want to be a writer? Hell, yes, you’d better like sentences. You want to be a painter? Buddy, you’d better like paint. One must have, you might say, a feel for the material.

I’m as happy as anyone else that watches are as widely appreciated and celebrated as they are in this Year Of Our Lord 2023, but I think a lot these days about an article that ran in the New York Times in 2013, entitled, “Art Is Hard To See Through The Clutter Of Dollar Signs.” So are watches. I feel as if there are a lot of people making a lot of attempts to figure out how to make watches interesting but if that’s where your head is at, I would respectfully submit that you’re barking up the wrong tree. Writing about watches is about as trivial a human activity as I can think of, all the blowhard puffery around the subject these days notwithstanding, but if you’re going to do it, it’s worth – and the subject is worth – taking seriously.