I've been practicing martial art for just over a decade now, no means world class, but one idiom I teach is "slow is smooth, smooth is fast", and generally tell

I've been practicing martial art for just over a decade now, no means world class, but one idiom I teach is "slow is smooth, smooth is fast", and generally tell students to slow down. We (people) get worked up and excited and anxious the second anything stressful happens. As we get worked up, we get tunnel-vision and things like "wheel spinning" (trying anything without consideration of if it helps) start. With music for example, if you try too hard to go fast for the sake of speed rather than smooth, you start to trip over your notes and it sounds worse than when you played one note at a time. Mushin (as another poster wrote), mindfulness, breathing techniques - all they focus on is calming ourselves down to that we can make better decisions. If you can remain calm when everything on fire, you can think and react better. My current research is inspired by athletes and other "physical" skills and how it translates to a knowledge skill like Computer Science. Some of the first steps in a physical skill is the creation of "smooth technique" - not fast, smooth. To get there takes time downing things slowly and methodically until it becomes muscle memory. Does this mean that there is some positive points to just drilling exercises? Obviously, only drilling without understanding is not useful, but I think somewhere along the way western education (or at least higher education) decided to not do as much drilling.