Welcome to Episode #126 of the Fight for a Happy Life podcast, “Blind Spots.”
In case you didn’t notice, I’ve been wearing glasses for several years… but not anymore! I recently underwent eye surgery and am happy to report that I can now see better than ever!
However, even with perfect vision, the fact is we can all have blind spots. We often see only what we WANT to see or only what we already know. Or maybe that’s just me?
In this episode, I’d like to share what I’ve learned about vision and blind spots—both physical and psychological—and how they affect our success and happiness on the mats and off.
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Blind Spots in Martial Arts
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TRANSCRIPT
Howdy, Ando here from Happy Life Martial Arts. Welcome to Fight for a Happy Life, the show that believes even a little martial arts makes life a whole lot better.
Today, if you’re watching the video, you might notice—no more glasses! That’s right, for the first show in maybe six years, I am not wearing glasses.
That’s because I am one month out from having a vision correction surgery. I’d like to tell you what I did and more importantly, what I’ve learned about vision and blind spots.
So, backing up, I was born and raised with perfect vision, 20/20. In fact, most of my life, I’ve had perfect vision. But then somewhere around the age of 47 or 48, I noticed, as is natural, that I was having trouble reading. And then a couple years later, I was having some trouble driving.
I even failed the DMV test, which was really embarrassing for me. I’d never had something in print, on the license, saying, “restricted license, must wear eyeglasses”. That hurt.
So, at first, of course, I accepted it. I realized this is normal, right? The eyes start to go as you get older. But it didn’t take long before I hated it. Absolutely hated it.
If you wear glasses, I’m sure you’re aware of this. My glasses were always lost or I was breaking them. Had to buy new ones all the time. I was walking around with two pairs of glasses, one for reading and one for distance. And I was always switching in between the two.
And if I’m trying to just duck down, do little fix-it projects, they’re always falling off my head. It just got to be a nightmare. I hated it.
Now, of course, if you’ve been wearing glasses your whole life, you’re probably more patient and more accustomed to it. But I was weak. I admit I was weak. It really got to me.
So, a couple years ago, I started looking into LASIK because I had some friends and they got tired of hearing me whine about my eyes. And they said, “Well, why don’t you just get LASIK?”
At first, that actually frightened me. Lasers in the eyes—I’m old school, that seemed crazy. But then, three months ago, I finally got the guts to go see a doctor for LASIK.
He sat me down and he said, “Hey man, listen—I could give you the LASIK, but at your age, what you should get is cataract surgery.”
Do I have cataracts? No, I don’t have cataracts. But if you get this surgery, you never will.
So it’s something called RLE, refractive lens exchange. And that was the promise: If you get this surgery, within 24 hours, you’ll be able to drive back for your first follow-up appointment, and you won’t need glasses again. You’ll have close vision, intermediate vision, and far vision.
Sounded too good to be true. But I did it.
So a month ago, had the surgery, and sure enough, 24 hours later, drove myself to the follow-up appointment. I don’t like necessarily using the word miracle, but it’s a miracle. I have not worn glasses now in a month, for reading or for driving.
So, if you’re interested in this kind of procedure, hit me up on email or in the comments, I’m more than happy to share some information on it. If you’re living in Los Angeles, I’m happy to refer you to the doctor who took care of me. It was definitely worth it.
What lessons have I taken from this experience?
Well, number one, don’t take anything for granted. I absolutely took my eyes for granted. I took my vision for granted for many, many years. And that was a crutch because I relied on them too much.
I think it’s natural that we’re wired as human beings to be very hands and eyes focused, especially nowadays when you have a device in your hands, and you’re texting all the time, and you’re driving, and you’re sitting at a computer, watching TV. It’s a lot of your eyes and your hands.
Then you lose touch with the rest of your body. So, I feel that that is its own blind spot of a sort. Because you’re living in this tunnel. You’re so reliant on your eyes that you don’t feel around you, you don’t widen out your awareness, you just focus on what’s in your hands and what’s right in front of you.
In short, if I can’t see it, it’s not there. That’s, to me, a blind spot.
Now, you can talk about physical blind spots, which is what I’ve been doing, but worse were the psychological blind spots. Not only couldn’t I literally see the horizon physically, psychologically, I could not see the future. I couldn’t set clear goals for myself.
I was asking myself, where are you going? Where do you think you’re going? And I couldn’t get a clear vision of it. It was as if my entire imagination was tied to my eyes. That might sound crazy, and that’s okay.
That frustration at first, feeling boxed in and somewhat limited, eventually got depressing. And then I just tied it into just getting old in general. I thought, well, you’ve been dealing with arthritis for several years. My shoulders, my feet, I’ve talked about these things. I lose my voice very easily nowadays. Lower energy. In short, I’m dying.
I’ve peaked and now I’m down that shady side of the hill, the cold side of that hill. And here we go. Now your eyes are going. You’re going blind.
So it’s hard to wake up and be enthusiastic when you can’t see the future.
Okay. It got worse. Am I being dramatic? Maybe.
I’ll tell you when it got really bad. The lockdowns, the COVID lockdowns, were five years ago now. Almost exactly five years ago. And of course, during the lockdown—I live in a very small apartment— couldn’t go outside. Couldn’t go to work, right?
At one point, couldn’t go to the parks. We had fires here in Los Angeles. Couldn’t go anywhere. So I was locked into a physical space, and then locked within the rims of my glasses or just blurred vision. And that was really suffocating.
But it gets worse because during the lockdowns, since I lost my business, I moved to Raleigh, North Carolina. Now listen, there are nice people in Raleigh, a lot of positives about Raleigh, so I’m not bashing Raleigh.
However, I live in Los Angeles, had been living in Los Angeles for decades, and it’s not Los Angeles. I’m used to sunshine. I’m used to mountains, vistas, ocean, wide expanses. There’s a freedom that comes with a large view. And in LA, that’s something else I just took for granted.
When I got to Raleigh—have you been there? It’s quite the opposite. There are no mountains. It’s flat. It’s not sunny all the time. Clouds, rain, overcast.
Trees. So many trees. I joked at some point, half-kiddingly, that it felt when you’re driving down these straight streets that—you couldn’t see the horizon, because they’re all curving around, flat land, just surrounded by trees. All you have are tree trunks, tree trunks, tree trunks, all around you. Which then felt like bars of a jail cell.
So, I felt like I was in a jail cell with a ceiling of clouds inside the frames of my glasses and with humidity in Raleigh, also your glasses fog up often. So, talk about suffocating. I really felt like I was just being crammed into my coffin when I lived there.
Couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. My freedom was just crushed.
So, two years it took for my wife and I to decide, let’s go back to Los Angeles. I can’t breathe, I can’t move. And we did. And that brought some relief. Absolutely. Nurtured my soul. But I still felt limited. I still was right back to the original restrictions of I can’t see.
So, that brings us to getting the surgery. I signed up. I showed up on time early, in fact. Got the surgery. And what’s funny is, the day after the surgery, my wife says to me, “It seems like you have more energy.”
What?
She said, “You know, it seems like you’re in a better mood.” She even said, “You know, you look a little bigger.”
All of that was a shock. She was saying, “Hey, it’s the old Ando, the one from seven or eight years ago. Old Ando is back.”
I was stunned, shocked, mostly because I thought I had learned this lesson. Not once, but many times. Several years ago, a doctor told me I was probably going to need a hip replacement. That was a downer, but I found a way to work around it, kept moving forward. With the arthritis, found a way around it. Herniated discs in my back, found a way around it.
So I’ve always been optimistic and found ways to adapt. And these are the messages that I usually share with you. Because I’ve done these things. But for some reason, this one, I couldn’t get past. It was as if it was the first challenge in my life.
The lesson there is that these things add up if you let them. We can all slide down that shady, cold slope, whichever one you find yourself on—whether it’s aging, whether it’s pain, whether it’s financial loss, relationship loss—we can all slide down into a pit of despair.
But we must remember over and over, and I’m talking to myself too, those limitations are false. It’s like you are purposely covering one of your eyes and not seeing what else is available out there. What else can you do?
So you can see when you feel limited, when you feel beaten down, you’ve got to differentiate between what is happening to you and what are you allowing to happen to you.
Take another look.
This is the big lesson. Take another look. You may not be as blind as you think. When you let one setback pull down the hole, then all is lost.
What you need to do, what I need to do, is still see the possibilities of what you can gain, not focus on what you’ve lost.
There’s always something else you can work on. There’s always another target to focus on. You can’t let the blind spot beat you down.
What about in self-defense? The equivalency here would be, you’re in a fight, you get punched one time, and you give up. You just say, that’s all right. That’s enough for me. You win. Take what you want.
You wouldn’t do that. Of course not. You wouldn’t teach that. Of course not. But sometimes that’s what happens.
You lose some money on an investment, and then that’s it. You’re done investing. You’re done trying new things. It’s over. We can’t let this happen.
Limitations in one area should not lead us to be limited in all areas.
Don’t be partialized. Don’t be shrunken down. Don’t be limited. Always look for what’s next. What else is out there? Because there’s always something.
Consider this…
In a way, limitations—the things that life throws at you that you don’t want, things that are taken away from you—they’re helpful.
Limitations are helpful in two ways.
The first way is, it gives you a chance to switch your focus. Maybe you’re pursuing one goal, and for whatever reason, that goal gets taken away. Rather than stall out and then do nothing, you have to go in a different direction, if you want to keep moving. So that limitation closes one door and directs you to another door.
If the other door that you originally were focused on wasn’t meant to be, for whatever reason, great, don’t take it personally. Take all that energy and enthusiasm, resources, and shoot them towards a new goal. So, limitations give you that opportunity. Switch to a more appropriate goal, something you can achieve.
The other way that limitations can help you is that it can narrow your focus. Maybe it doesn’t change it, but you can narrow down on one aspect of what you’re doing and start specializing in it. That means go deeper instead of going wider.
If you’re not great with kicks anymore because you had to have some type of knee surgery and you’re always going to be careful with that leg, okay, now you can go deeper in your hand techniques.
Or maybe now you pick up a knife for the first time in your training, and you really start appreciating what a weapon can do to equalize a bad situation. Great. Your limitation led you to a specialty and a new power. We should be open to that.
Now, of course, when we got close to the surgery, I wasn’t exactly that optimistic about limitations. I was still in a pretty dark place, I would say. And so I started to think, a couple of days before that surgery, when I realized, “Oh my god, they’re going to do what?”
They’re going to cut into my eyeball, take out the lens, put in an artificial lens, and just fingers crossed hope that fixes things. I got a little nervous, so I started convincing myself, of exactly what I just told you, that maybe limitations are good for me. Maybe this is better this way, to have blurry vision.
For instance, from a self-defense standpoint, what if you get punched in the nose, and your eyes water? Shouldn’t you be able to still operate when you can’t see clearly? Well, of course.
What if you’re wearing a hoodie, and it gets pulled over your head? Shouldn’t you still be able to fight back? Well, of course. I don’t wear hoodies, but theoretically, absolutely, of course.
Certainly, in wrestling and BJJ, early on, people were smothering me, grinding their chest in my face, or the gi—a wet gi—is hanging over your face, or they’re holding it over your face. So you have to get used to being smothered.
All of that helped me to trust my body. The limitation of having blurred vision close up really helped my grappling quite a bit, helped my takedowns quite a bit, helped close-in fighting quite a bit.
I had to learn to feel more because I could see less. I had to learn to trust my body more and not just my visual acuity.
So those are positives. Maybe I don’t want to lose those.
It also helped me slow down. When I had my perfect vision, I was pretty cocky. I could drive fast, I could run fast, make decisions quickly. When I couldn’t see very well, I had to slow down.
It’s just a matter of survival. I didn’t want to kill anybody either. I had to be more careful. I was more purposeful, more deliberate. And that helped me not waste energy.
So having the blurred vision, having these limitations, helped me change focus, narrow focus, helped me to feel more, trust my body more, trust my intuition more, and slowed me down so I didn’t waste energy, made me more deliberate in all my actions.
So that’s a pretty good argument, huh? I don’t need that eye surgery after all.
Nah! I went and got it anyway. I talked myself into it. I said, this is crazy, I can’t do this anymore. So I did get the surgery.
My hope being that I can keep the positive benefits that I’ve learned these last few years with having blurred vision and move forward with the benefits of having clear vision.
For me, self-defense, it’s a no-brainer. I like seeing who’s walking in the room, seeing where their hands are, seeing what they’re wearing. Any clue I can get to judge the safety of my situation.
I like being able to see down the road, see who’s coming down this aisle. I like getting an early warning system of what’s in my environment. I like reading someone’s face in micro detail. I like reading micro expressions when possible.
I need every clue I can get. I value perception. This is how I feel we all need to prevent danger by getting as much information from that environment as possible.
So I feel very blessed that I met this doctor, that I had the resources to pay for this surgery, and that I’ve been healthy enough to heal from it. So far so good, no glasses. So it’s been a blessing, a miracle.
Now, I’m going to give you a warning.
Even though I have vision again, and they say it’s 20/12 vision now, instead of 20/20, which means my vision is better than it was before. I did not count on that. Even with so-called perfect vision, there is still a risk of having blind spots. For me, for you, for anybody.
Blind spots occur for anyone, either when you’re only looking for what you want to see, or you’re only looking for things that will confirm what you already know.
When you have those attitudes, you are missing out. You are blind. You are not seeing what you don’t want to see, and you are not seeing what you don’t know. That’s how extreme that is.
I can’t live like that. So I am always going to ask myself now, what am I missing? What am I not seeing? What am I taking for granted here? What’s behind that door? What’s in the shadows?
It’s funny just the way the brain works. I remember several years ago getting stuck in side control in BJJ. So I went on YouTube looking for answers, and I found a video from Carlos Machado, and I saw this technique that he performed. I thought, Oh, that’s a really cool technique. Got it in my brain.
I saw it. My eyes saw it. Took it into the dojo. It kind of worked, kind of didn’t. Glad I tried it, but didn’t quite work for me.
I’m blessed again, because a couple years later, Carlos Machado came to the Brazilian Jiu Jitsu School where I take classes. Rigan Machado’s Academy in Beverly Hills. It’s his brother. He happened to be there one day.
He wasn’t on the mats. He was visiting for lunch. He had a sport jacket on, but I took the opportunity to walk over and say, “Excuse me, Professor, I saw this technique you did on YouTube. I just have a question about it because I can’t quite get it to work.”
He’s such a nice guy. If you haven’t met the Machados, I find them all to be very nice guys. He actually took off his sport jacket and said, “Oh, here, let me show you.” He got on the mats with me and talked me through the technique.
Even cooler, he said, “Well, this was in the video, but here’s what’s not in the video.” And he gave me a little extra. I was like, oh my god, this is fantastic. So a blessing.
So excitedly, went back to class, and it definitely worked better. Oh boy, good, I got the secret sauce here. But there was still something missing. It wasn’t working all the time. And as an idealist, I wanted this to work all the time.
A couple more years go by, and he ends up showing that technique on a separate video—ran across it. I was like, Oh, there’s that technique. And I had not noticed something about his leg work. The way he used his legs, I had not seen in the first video. And I had not noticed him doing when he showed me in person.
I was blind to it the first time I saw it. I was blind to it when he did it to me. I was blind to discovering it when I was performing it and practicing it. It was only now, several years later, from when I’d first seen it, that it’s suddenly now made sense. And now it’s a much higher percentage move for me.
But that’s one example of how even with perfect vision, even with a video reference, something I can watch in slow motion, even with someone showing me and talking me through it, helping me hand to hand—blind, blind, blind, not seeing it.
So I have to go back through every lesson I’ve ever gotten. Everything I’ve ever heard or seen or felt from every teacher I’ve ever had and say, what didn’t I see? What was missing? Why isn’t this working as well as when they did it?
These, I think, are healthy questions. Don’t presume that what you’re seeing is all there is to see. Don’t presume that what you know is all there is to know. I think there’s always more. And I think that’s good news.
So the big point of today’s show: if you feel that you’ve lost something, if you feel somehow behind the curve, if you feel disabled, please, don’t give up hope on this. Don’t give up hope on your goals. You might have to switch them, but don’t give up on them.
Focus on what you can do. There’s always something you can do. And even if you can’t, you should die with that attitude anyway.
When someone gets you in a choke, if you have trained yourself to always think about, well, what do I have? What can I do? Then there’s always a chance of escape. There’s always a chance of survival.
If you just accept the loss, you just accept the limitation, you just accept being blind, then there’s no choice. You lose. So don’t let that happen.
Take your self-defense strategy of always seeing a possibility, of never giving up, of always fighting, and apply it to every other part of your life. Always give yourself a chance to fight for what you want. I think that’s the secret for achieving your goals and living a happy life.
Well, they say that you teach what you need to learn. Believe me, my friend, I record these podcasts for you and for me. I hope that sharing my experiences either helps you or at least lets you know that you’re not alone.
Until next time, smiles up, my friend. Let that smile be your shield and your sword. Keep fighting for a happy life.
