These points of view also are on the same page, and I think they dovetail nicely with the previous ones, though not in completely obvious way. I think both of you are talking about something that I'd try to capture as a kind of seriousness about what you're doing. Proficiency flows from seriousness (in the fullness of time, of course!) so although they aren't quite the same thing, they're related. For some people I've worked with, TKD is kind of an incidental part of their lives; it's not an endeavor that enters into their view of who they are. They do it, but it's not something they think about, or try to work on to consciously improve ... in other words, they don't take it seriously past a certain point. People I think of as MAists think about what they're doing when they do TKD (or whatever art); it matters to them how a certain technique works or what a certain hyung is telling them about combat. And of course, such people do tend to get more proficient much faster.
Shads is right: we can only narrow the meaning down so much before we hit the level of irreconcilable individual variationwe're going to wind up with a circle, not a point, because `MAist' is fuzzybut it's good to try to make the radius of that circle of variation as small as possible...
