Someone shouts. Spills a drink. Bumps into you.

And now you’re in a fight. Or—

—maybe you’re walking home.

Or on the bus.

And someone grabs you. Hits you. Pins you down.

What do you do when no one’s around to help?

What do you do when the stranger’s twice your size?

We don’t tend to think about things like this. But actually, it’s silly when we really do—we seldom spend time preparing for potential problems before they actually become problems.

We do this with self-defense, with working out, with eating healthy, with going back to school. We do this with our dreams and aspirations. “I’ll do it tomorrow”, we tell ourselves—one of the most insidious sentences in the English language. Tomorrow has a funny way of never showing up when preceded by those four words.

We know this, and we say it anyway.

And yet, we act like we learn all we need through Google and Facebook, forgetting what we learned five minutes later; or we watch one video on basic Yoga every now and again, and then claim we actually practice Yoga; we hear a friend talk about Paleo and we pawn off the information to others as if we’re experts.

We’ve lost the time to learn. And in turn we’ve lost concern for ourselves. The hard work it takes to learn something—anything—doesn’t happen ‘now and then’ or ‘once in a while’; it’s consistent, tedious, painstaking trial and error, it’s mistake after mistake after blinding failure. Until you finally dunk that ball, or score that takedown, or draw that perfect picture.

And that’s all beautiful and well, but when it comes to your safety—it might also mean saving your own life.