Motivation Quote by Morihei Ueshiba

Ueshiba’s line cuts against the most marketable myth in martial arts: that somewhere, hidden behind incense and lineage, there’s a “real” move that turns you into an unbeatable outlier. He’s not just debunking mysticism; he’s attacking a consumer fantasy. “Secret techniques” are a seductive shortcut because they let you keep your self-image intact: you’re not unprepared, you’re simply not initiated. Ueshiba refuses that alibi. Progress, he insists, is earned in repetition so ordinary it feels humiliating.

The phrasing matters. “Train and train” is blunt, almost deliberately unpoetic. That redundancy is the point: improvement isn’t a revelation, it’s an accumulation. He’s also policing the culture around him. Early-20th-century Japanese budo was thick with hierarchies, oaths, and guarded curricula. Secrecy protected status as much as it protected technique. By framing reliance on secrets as a dead end, Ueshiba is quietly shifting authority away from gatekeepers and toward practice itself. The dojo stops being a temple of hidden knowledge and becomes a workshop.

There’s a moral edge here, too. In aikido, technique is supposed to express character: calm, restraint, control without cruelty. “Secret techniques” promise domination; endless training demands self-governance. Subtext: if you want the art to change your body and your temperament, you can’t outsource that transformation to trivia whispered at the top rank. The real “secret” is that there isn’t one - just the daily grind, honestly faced.