Jason Korol

They tell children to keep their hands to themselves and stop talking so much. I suppose that's fine advice for the vast majority of people. For me, however, it turned out to be the exact things I do for a living.

Born and raised in upstate New York, I moved south 25 years ago to open a martial arts school and write. I expected instant success but kept running headlong into reality, which forced me to either give up or lick my wounds and work on those aspects of my craft and character that sorely needed tweaking. Perhaps I should be ashamed to admit that it took me the better part of a decade to get my act together but it was time well spent. Struggles - and failures! - teach us the stuff we truly need, right? Through them we learn character. And humility too.

As you can see, my books - non-fiction and fiction alike - focus on self-defense. You'll notice a few themes throughout all of them: love of liberty and the need for free people, if they're going to remain free, to learn to govern themselves. I always figure that a book on self-defense techniques, after all, that omits personal character and logical philosophy, is a contradiction in terms. No criminal can do the personal damage to one's life that we can do to ourselves if we aren't disciplined and guided by the proper foundations. I take that really seriously in all my work. Our contemporary culture is always crying - and loudly at that - that our problems are "out there". This focus on society being wrong and/or evil has led us to this point where a generation thinks they can be happy without self-control, honor and work-ethic. It's led us to a period where we assume that if we have a challenge, others must change, not us. That's a horrible lie and my work obliterates such nonsense. Real liberty demands that we pursue character and honor. That has to be the true foundation of self-defense or else I'm teaching techniques in a vacuum. I take this point seriously because martial artists should be men and women who love and try to preserve peace. And there can be no peace, not in a family, or a town, or a country where everyone blames someone else for their problems. That's dangerous business.

As for my background in martial arts, I started in Wing Chun back in 1981. My older brother started teaching me the Alan Lee Wing Chun he was learning while he was in college. I trained for years in that and then trained in the Hawkins Cheung lineage from a private instructor in Albany, New York. Also, I trained extensively in Jeet Kune Do during this period as well. I had several instructors (as many of us did during that period of seminar training) but my primary influence was Ted Wong (one of Bruce Lee's primary students and close friend) who was introduced to me through Jonathan Parsons in 1995. Obviously, we're all influenced in a variety of ways from every instructor we have, but it was Ted Wong who gave me the principles and sources that Bruce Lee used on his journey and my teachings are reflections of that. Lastly, in 2010, I met Sifu Tony Massengill and have learned his Efficient Warrior Wing Chun system. Sifu Tony is an utterly brilliant self-defense man, one of both principle and practice - a rare find. You can find his books on Amazon too.

In the last several years I've been a columnist and writer for Wing Chun Illustrated (meeting deadlines and word counts has made a man out of me!), a truly remarkable non-partisan Wing Chun publication. It's a humbling gig because there are so many great writers and martial artists featured. My fiction centers around great warriors, big themes, and high-stakes drama - both physically and philosophically. My other "job", when not writing too much, or trying to talk sense into my two wonderfully quirky boxer dogs, is teaching at Greenville Academy of Martial Arts in South Carolina. We've developed a great family of people who work hard at making themselves better every day, both physically and personally. It's an incredible blessing to have achieved such dreams. I really mean that. Like I said, though, I never would have reached them had I not submitted to the disciplines I extol in my work.

In all, I hope and pray that my work can be a blessing to you just as the principles and truths have been to me. I hope they can inspire you to be a man or woman with a true warrior/servant spirit - with a heart of love and discipline too because, contrary to what our culture tells us, we can't truly have one without the other.