Interesting read regarding training with timers.

[Exurbankevin]

Grant is the one of roughly three gunsmiths in the country that can still properly tune a Colt. Beyond that he's a vocal advocate for PDN and ICE and regurgitates everything Rob says without any question as to the validity. I've talked to him a couple times in regards to revolver and lever action rifle specifics and got the impression that he felt as if my questions were bothersome and a waste of his time.

I found his first book an excellent primer for setting up a revolver for the uninitiated. I found his second book a jumbled mess of ICE rhetoric poorly meshed with his own theories on how to run a revolver.

I recently attempted to get Rob to explain how one can evaluate performance without standards. He proved to be a master of avoidance and deflection and referred me to his site. I'll repeat that Grant is essentially a mouthpiece for ICE and while he isn't as smooth as Rob in deflecting specific questions, he rarely answers them either.

I am probably 1/50th as qualified to talk about this sort of thing as most people here, but CFS seems to be ideally suited to shooters who want to go 2/3rds up the first slope of the Dunning-Kruger curve and then stay there, and not having standards and/or benchmarks is a good way to instill the illusion of mastery in your students. This does wonders for their ego (and yours, heck, you might even become "renowned"...), but it does little to help your students actually achieve mastery.

[Paul Sharp]

I got yelled at for taking notes... LOL

"I'm over it!"

That was pretty funny. In the 3 hour car ride from the airport I told him he should have a camera crew follow him around so we can capture all of his SDave'isms.

He said, "Yeah dude, that won't work though. That would only capture what I HAD said. You'd still be behind regarding what I'm SAYING. You'll always be behind. Anyway, so dude I'm looking at this bike..."

Pure SDave moment.


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[Cory]

I'm not sure that I can say anything here that hasn't been said by people far more experienced, skilled, and probably smarter. But to someone who has been a casual shooter for a long time, who recently started using a phone app to try and improve... I can't believe I never timed myself before. I just didn't know, what I didn't know.

Some people want to improve, and some people want to be great right now. People who value improving come up against an obstacle (be it failure, or a poor performance, or what have you) and they put in the work to do better. They adjust themselves to the standard or goal. People who want to be great right now come against an obstacle and don't perform well, they change the standard to themselves. They rationalize, blame shift, and make up excuses about why they didn't do well. More commonly they will demean the standard and say how it isn't relevant or isn't valid in context. These people plateau. They don't get better because they stop putting in the work. For them the standard or goal is no longer valuable anyway.

That having been said, someone who values the current perception of being great could start out at a high performance level and stay there. Someone who values improvement might be bested by them in the short term, but won't be in the long term.

While I'm still relatively early in trying to improve my shooting, I've been improving my running for about 5 months. If it wasn't for a measurable goal, and a measurable skill level of where I am, I wouldn't know if I had done better or not. and If I decided "running is stupid anyway" I wouldn't have kept at it. Make sense?

-Cory

[Mr_White]

This gets to the core of the issue. It's about pursuing excellence in everything we do. Why would any of us want to do SOME things well when with a little more effort we can do ALL things well? Most, if not all on this board are motivated shooters. Pursuing excellence in performance is the juice that makes all the squeezing worth it. Folks enjoy the process otherwise who in their right mind would spend all this time in seemingly mindless tasks? Dry firing? Movement drills? Hell, what's more mind numbing than a reload press?? Yet it's all part of the process involved in pursuing this internal standard we all hold ourselves to and hope to achieve.

Much of what we do was codified in non-Buddhist terms by https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mihaly_Csikszentmihalyi a long time ago. We do this stuff because we enjoy the process. We enjoy the pursuit. Excellence is an internal, unwavering standard we hunt so when we read or hear anything that essentially carries the torch for something that resembles mediocrity? We lose our shit. To put it plainly.

I had this conversation with a trainer that, in my opinion, espouses the good enough approach. He said, "we're speaking past each other. Like we're speaking different languages..." Because we are. I want to be great at everything I do, not good enough. As BBI mentioned, taking my reload from 1.6 to 1.5 won't really matter in da streetz or even in the food court but for folks like us? Making that improvement is what ALL of this stuff is really about.

To quote myself talking to the good enough trainer, if all I cared about is what works in the street I'd buy carry a clip-it knife and a Raven .22.


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Wow, that is so well said Paul. Absolutely right on.

[jetfire]

One note about this that came out of a different conversation: I find it mildly humorous that a guy known for carrying and shooting a wheelgun (Grant) is poo-pooing the idea that one might have to reload said wheelgun.

Shooting a wheelgun is a lot like flying a fighter jet: when you take off you're already out of gas, and if you have to do anything other than fly around in a pattern, you're going to be REALLY REALLY out of gas.

[Mr Pink]

Pure SDave moment.

I've got a lot of time around SDave (Army SF, Competitions, Contracting and classes). My favorite as he's yelling at a student: "DUDE! I can tell you how to do! I can show you how to do it! But I can't f*cking do it for you!"