Michael Dila's Profile

Parkour is about repetition and practice

When I see a skilled traceur, I admire the dedication and the mental strength. There are some people who just have superior physical ability, but there are no secret techniques in parkour. A lot of the things traceurs do aren’t necessarily impressive physically, anyway. From a traceur’s point of view, the task is often mental. Some people can master fear. Other people might have more determination and, in the end, accomplish more things

One thing we say is we do parkour, but a lot of the time we aren’t; we’re practicing for parkour. True parkour is hardly ever done. If I’m practicing a vault and I turn around and do it again, that’s not parkour, because it’s continuing a circle—it’s not making a path.

I practice parkour not because I think I’m going to have to use it but because I see it as making me stronger physically and mentally, just the way people don’t go into martial arts because they plan to fight someone—they keep fit or get discipline.

Bruce Lee that’s my motto: ‘There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. A man must constantly exceed his level.’

The movements are performed at a dead run. The more efficient and fluid the path they define, and the more difficult and harrowing the terrain they cross, the more elegant the performance is considered by the discipline’s practitioners.

Parkour was created in Lisses, a medium prosperous suburb of Paris, in the early nineteen-nineties, by a reserved and restless teen-age boy named David Belle.

Parkour has no explicit glossary, but traceurs typically describe the fundamental maneuvers as the cat leap, the precision jump, the roll, and the wall run

All these moves link to one another, so that a traceur might say that he went cat to cat, or that he tic-taced a wall or konged it, then did a roll and a wall leap. The intention is to become so adept that the movements recede in one’s awareness and can be performed without reflection. Jazz musicians occasionally say that a novice needs to learn all about his instrument, then he needs to learn all about music, then he needs to forget everything and learn how to play, which is a paradigm that also fits parkour, especially because both activities at their most proficient are improvised. A jazz musician wants to be comfortable in any key. Similarly, a traceur wants to be sufficiently fluent so that he can cross any terrain in flight without compromise.

how big is that surplus?

television
watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year.
Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a
year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the
U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads.
This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they
find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia
don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of
this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an
architecture of participation.

what makes reading these books simultaneously so interesting is observing how Galbraith describe an emergent system without the language and frameworks available to Johnson 50 years later. Consequently, Galbraith’s book is hints at a larger system even as he struggles to describe how the decisions of hundreds of thousands of individuals could be simultaniously coorindated but not directed.

This notion that great misadventures are the work of great and devious adventurers, and that the latter can and must be found if we are to be safe, is a popular one of our time

There was no one who caused it. Remember that. Galbraith wants to pin it on something large and decentralized but can’t put his finger on what it is. Consider this line “No one engineered the speculation that preceded it. Both were the product of the free choice and decisions of thousands of individuals. The latter were not lead to the slaughter. There were impelled to it by the seminal lunacy which has always seized people who are seized in turn with the notion that they can become very rich.”

Finding the people will achieve little compared to understanding the basic set of rules that created these incentives - removing the people will do little. Managing the incentives will do everything. A big part of this may involve new regulations, but probably more importantly it requires recognizing that whole new business models are required as these shape incentives far more than regulations.