The Line on the Dojo Wall

In 1989 I trained Shotokan karate at Academia Meikyo, in QI 7 of Guará I, in Brasília.

I was 10 years old.

I no longer remember the teacher’s name. I don’t remember the name of the other instructor either, a Black woman, incredibly talented, wearing a gi so white it seemed to glow. That still bothers me today. Some people pass through our lives for a short time and leave an image so strong that it keeps existing inside us decades later.

I remember a few things about Meikyo. The smell of the tatami. The gi. The belt. The feeling of leaving the white belt behind and receiving the yellow one. To a kid, that was almost a military decoration.

But one thing stuck in a different way.

On the dojo wall there was a line:

Better the tears of defeat than the shame of never having fought.

I never forgot it.

Back then I didn’t have the maturity to understand everything that was in there. I thought it was beautiful, strong, a karate thing. But a line like that gets into a kid’s head and keeps running underneath, like a program resident in memory.

Years later, around 2007 or 2008, I was teaching Java at the X25 school, also in Brasília.

I had a difficult class. Not difficult in the sense of bad people. It was difficult because the material genuinely wasn’t sinking in. Java, object orientation, syntax, logic, the exam coming up. Anyone who has taught knows: some classes walk on their own and some you have to push uphill.

The time came to give the exam.

I told them:

“Folks, next class is the exam.”

The reaction was immediate. They started complaining. They said they wouldn’t show up, that it was better to skip it and fail right away than to take the exam and fail anyway. The room slipped into that spirit of defeat before the fight. The worst kind of defeat.

Then the line came out of my mouth without much planning:

“Come on, folks. Let’s go. Better the tears of defeat than the shame of never having fought.”

The room went quiet. It was a different kind of silence, not the one where students wait for the teacher to finish the sermon. It felt like the line had hit something.

One student, older than me, looked at me and said:

“Karate Meikyo, Guará 1, right, teacher?”

Right then I understood.

“That’s it. Are you from there too?”

He said yes.

And I answered:

“And you’re still going to give up on the exam?”

He stayed quiet for a moment. Then he said no.

In the end, everyone took the exam. And everyone passed.

This story stayed with me because it shows how certain things cross time in a strange way. A line written on the wall of a karate dojo in 1989 showed up almost twenty years later in a Java classroom. And it showed up at the right moment.

It wasn’t a LinkedIn coach line. It didn’t promise victory, it didn’t say every effort would be rewarded, it didn’t say wanting it was enough. It said something drier: you may lose, but you don’t run from the fight. And that matters more than winning.

Defeat hurts, but it passes. The shame of not having tried stays. It turns into an excuse, and then into a habit.

That day the class didn’t need a better explanation about Java. It needed to stop running away, sit in the chair, and fight with what it had.

Sometimes education is that. It isn’t turning anyone into a genius or doing magic. It’s not letting a person give up before the first attempt.

I never ran into that student again. I also never saw Academia Meikyo again. I don’t know the teacher’s name, I don’t know the name of that instructor with the immaculate white gi. Maybe one day I’ll still find out.

But the line stayed.

And somehow it kept teaching alongside me many years later.