After months of being a black belt, myself, I've found a shocking truth! Black Belts are NOT special! ... AND they don't know any more about life, or even the whole of Jiu-Jitsu!
it's an absolutely true statement. black belts are certainly not special. but a great part of it is that handing out black belts got inflated during the influx of asian martial arts in the 80s & 90s. because dojos in the usa and europe were commercial entities and people expected to at some point "arrive at" being the black belt they paid so much course fees for over the years... not denying that a black belt of course had to prove a high level of skill nonetheless. in traditional dojos in china and japan the black belt was never applied for by the student/monk but only presented to very virtuous and upright characters who also happen to have mastered the arts over a very long period of time. this type of culmination was relatively rare. of course nowadays this has changed there as well, since the transactional nature of modern societies has increased a lot.
I'm going to disagree. It takes a lot of hard work and usually a lot of setbacks to reach black belt. Someone who has a black belt has been humbled many times over. Someone who has a black belt has shown dedication to a craft for years to come. It's not a perfect measuring stick of their character. But it does take a special kind of person to stick through it all and get there.
