Mastery Beyond Sight: The Illusion of Randomness in Skill
I came across a thought-provoking post today from Al Ridenhour, Owner and Founder of Warrior Flow and co-author of Overcoming Fear: The Method. He was discussing how his martial arts masters’ movements, though seemingly random to an untrained eye, were actually deliberate and precise. Their ability to track a phenomenon known as shadow impressions was a major key in their mastery.
This reminded me of a principle in hockey—a concept popularized by Wayne Gretzky, the legendary Canadian player—who said, “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it’s been.” In response to Al's video, I commented on his Facebook page: “In a nutshell, I heard you say, as an analogy, the majority of people your master worked with would track the puck where it is and try and guide where it goes next. While the Masters not only went to where the puck was going but as a result had already made the calculations as to from THAT position what they needed to do to get the puck where they wanted it to be.”
This all comes down to time—where we are in it and how we relate to it. But before I go deeper, I want to clarify a crucial distinction: random is not the same as unpredictable. These are two fundamentally different ideas. Randomness suggests chaos—something unknowable and unstructured. Unpredictability, however, is something we may not yet understand, but can learn.
Think about technology. If you were to take today’s advanced science back in time, those from an earlier era might perceive it as magic. To them, it would not be something complex or learnable—it would just be. Similarly, students training under Al's martial masters often fail to see the method behind their movements. They don’t register them as unpredictable; they perceive them as random. And from that place in time, they are right.
But here’s the difference: to those who react to where the puck is or was, the movements of those who anticipate where it will be appear both random and unpredictable. Their limited perspective makes mastery seem like a trick—something beyond comprehension. And when skill is dismissed as random, it becomes something they don’t have to learn, because in their minds, it’s not even possible to learn. If it's a skill, however, then failure to understand it isn’t due to randomness—it’s due to a lack of knowledge or experience.
Al is absolutely right—the skills of his masters are not random. They are learnable. And mastery isn’t magic. It takes time, training, and a willingness to see beyond the limits of the moment. Your job isn’t to assume something is unknowable—it’s to commit to the process of learning it. There is a reality where these skills exist for you. The only question is: how much time are you willing to invest?
