advice - Dirty White Belt

October 26, 2016

15 Quotes From Moby Dick That Are Actually About Jiujitsu

I first read Moby Dick at a young age, too many years ago to admit. I first realized that the book is actually about jiu-jitsu just this week.

Herman Melville’s opus chronicles a titanic struggle between an otherworldly whale and his human arch-nemesis. Although ultimately the whale teaches Ahab to laugh and love again through the healing power of sea chanties — sorry for the spoilers — the novel is really about obsession.

The most powerful passages from what is, to me, the most American of novels, hit on these themes: there is power in passion and commitment, but also danger; the beautiful corners of life can also be terrible, and that terror has substantial interplay with the beauty; and finally, we’re drawn as human beings to perilous pursuits, but there is peril in ignorance and comfort as well.

Moby Dick is about a subculture of diverse, intrepid people who share an extreme life experience that only a small fraction of human beings ever will. Their journeys take them spectacular places, far out of each individual’s comfort zone, and are marked by the knowledge that nothing really serves as a substitute. Like I said: it’s about jiu-jitsu.

If this makes sense to you, you’re probably a nerd. If this really makes sense to you, you’re a nerd who trains. Either way, you’re in the right place.

I could’ve easily picked the top 100 passages from Moby Dick that speak to the jiujitsu lifestyle. Upon the advice of my attorney and life coach (a 10-year-old hound dog named Penny), I’ve whittled it down to 15. Here goes:

1. “…the great floodgates of the wonder-world swung open…”

The narrator of Moby Dick, who goes by the name Ishmael, speaks with awe and wonder of being at sea, using this phrase to describe his perception.

Remember the first time you hit a move cleanly on someone who was trying with all their might to stop you? Or: remember the moment when you first chained two or three moves together? For me, executing my first scissor sweep was like watching an angel came down from heaven and play the entirety of Led Zeppelin IV.

When you’re in the flow, the whole glorious world of possibility opens. This is what it’s like when Ishmael goes to sea, or when many of us hit the mats. We open the great floodgates of the wonder-world.

Learning shin on shin guard from Michelle Nicolini opens a lot of doors.

2. “…to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.”

The most rhetorically powerful speech of the book is also its most direct reference to grappling. These climactic epithets Ahab shrieks at Moby Dick always fire me up — and make me think of those gnarly death rolls in the final round of a tournament.

Ahab could really cut a promo, even on a marine mammal. I think more people would love Moby Dick if they produced a version that included just his venomous speeches. I mean, just read that passage again: it’s as if the Spartans at Thermopylae had a speechwriter that wrote for an academic version of Ric Flair. If they boiled down Moby Dick to these speeches, it’d be like Thomas Jefferson’s version of the Bible: lean and mean.

3. “It is not down on any map; true places never are.”

The cannibal moral center of the novel, Queequeg, is a native of Rokovoko, “an island far away to the West and South.” But you can’t find it. Because it’s not on the map.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f7/Queequeg.JPG/220px-Queequeg.JPG
Speaking of jiujitsu is a journey is common — because it is. Your instructor might show you a move, or teach you a concept. It’s up to you to perfect that move for you, or internalize that concept. That takes time, and effort, and commitment.

It also takes faith. If your instructor could tell you “do these three things, and you’ll be an expert at guard passing,” it would make life a lot simpler. But no honest instructor would do that. You’ve got to pursue that yourself, trusting that walking the path the right way will ultimately lead you to the destination.

Jiujitsu is the truth. That’s why there’s no roadmap.

4. “Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off – then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”

This is Ishmael describing in vivid detail how turbulent his life would get between trips to sea. In the book, the sea provided a release valve for all that pent-up aggression.

One of my friends used to get into a lot of street fights. He’s trained in several martial arts, fought, competed, and generally run the gamut of training options. Once he told me that jiujitsu in the gi is the only art that ever made him a better person.

Don’t walk around knocking hats off of people, or beloved mascots: train.

We all know people who can only simmer down their blood by training. If you’re reading this, you can probably name a dozen people who are sanest and calmest immediately after class.

Maybe you’re one of those people. I am.

5. “There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own.”

Sometimes in class, you’re a step late to every move. Sometimes the people you usually submit get away, the people you usually dominate positionally give you hell, and the people who usually whoop up on you lay the smack down even worse than normal.

Sometimes a meme of you getting choked ends up everywhere on the Internet. Life is funny!

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/de/d9/06/ded906383160a88c3e947d620e1923ca.jpg

6. “I try all things, I achieve what I can.”

One of many “words to live by” lines in the book comes from the maybe-unreliable narrator, Ishmael. When he tries to describe the whale, he confesses it’s not his area of expertise, but he’ll give it a shot.

You have to do this in jiujitsu: you might know you can’t pass your instructor’s guard, but try. Fail. Fail again. Fail better. Try everything. Achieve what you can.

Sometimes, you can win the worlds. But on your way to achieving one thing, don’t forget to keep trying all things.

7. “There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.”

Ishmael says this after he’s been staring into a fire, reaching a near hypnotic state.

The reality is this: sometimes, you should feel bad. Ego isn’t always the enemy, and disappointment is a natural fact of jiujitsu life. There is always someone better than you, and sometimes you have a tough day of competition or a night where everything you try gets shut down.

I’m not going to tell you not to feel bad when this happens. Disappointment is the source of strong motivation. There is wisdom in the woe that comes from a bad result.

In Moby Dick, Ishmael acknowledges that people with strong will — those with souls “in the mountains” — can profit from woe and gloom. This is the way we transcend the ordinary. Don’t let it drive you crazy, though, lest you end up on a boat with some nutjob, or in an emo band.

8. “Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure.

Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks.”

When you walk into a jiu-jitsu gym, you might think you know who the baddest people are just by looking at them. You’re often wrong.

Like the sea under the surface, jiu-jitsu is subtle, and the deadly creatures come in all shapes, sizes, genders and ages. Like the sharks in Moby Dick, the mat animals are treacherously hidden until it’s too late to avoid them.

9. “Ignorance is the parent of fear.”

This is how Ishmael feels about bigotry: that lack of exposure to cultures like Queequegs leads people to make unfounded assumptions, resulting in anxiety — which perpetuates the lack of awareness that leads to fear in the first place.

This is how I feel about leglocks.

10. “Squeeze! Squeeze! Squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me, and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-labourers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules.

Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally, as much as to say,—Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill humour or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.”

Who doesn’t love a good head squeeze? We squeeze each other’s heads with our arms, we squeeze each other’s necks with our legs. Then, like the sailors on the Pequod, we squeeze hands afterward in a gesture of friendship and comity.

… and in that passage, Ishmael is talking about whalers breaking up the lumpy spermaceti that is found in the whale’s head and sold. What did you think he was talking about?

11. “To enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.”

Life is a struggle between hardness and softness. You don’t want to be completely hard, because it stops you from enjoying existence. You don’t want to be completely soft, because you’re unprepared for what life throws at you.

Jiujitsu is fun. Jiujitsu is hard. Hard training necessitates discomfort, which prepares you for other forms of discomfort.

You’ll never stop being uncomfortable. You will learn to embrace the discomfort.

12. “For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught – nay, but the draught of a draught.”

The week Grandmaster Helio Gracie died, he was working on a new choke. Think about that. He’d constructed this art over his whole long life — and was still working on innovations at the end of it.

You’re never done doing jiujitsu. Ever. The power of the art is that you’ll never finish. There is — like the open sea — always more to explore.

This is the source of the blog’s name, too: training jiujitsu means you never stop learning.

13. “I am past scorching; not easily can’st thou scorch a scar.”

Stuff like this happens to you in jiujitsu. Are you really going to be scared of a conversation with your boss after this?

14. “All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.”

Ahab’s admission of his own lunacy rings true for me. I think meticulously and constantly about the best practices for improving at jiujitsu. I review scientific research about nutrition, body and brain health, and the process by which we learn complex tasks.

I do this so I can take part in things that strike the people who don’t train as, well, nuts.

Once, during a hard session preparing for a friend’s fight, we had five upper belts and one white belt taking part. It was summer in North Carolina and the temperature had cracked 100 degrees with the type of humidity associated with a steam room. The sweat was flowing like water and the action was non-stop. The wet air made it tough to breathe.

The white belt was young and in good shape: at least as good as any of us, and maybe better. But he was struggling, and after each drill or sparring round he’d look around at each of us in disbelief. I wasn’t sure what he was looking for — I was using all my mental resources to follow instructions and not fall apart, in that order — until about 20 minutes into the training.

He walked to the door, and opened it, letting in a fresh burst of air. Then he walked outside and shouted back at us:

“You guys are crazy!” It was clear he was leaving.

Without looking up, all five of us instinctually replied: “See ya.”

We kept training. He shook his head in disbelief and I don’t think I’ve seen him since.

If you want to improve, these are the things you do. It’s the correct means to a mad end. Here’s the thing: no one who doesn’t train has to understand.

15. “I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing.”

This one is better left out of context. It’s just a good rule to live your life by.

We have no idea what our futures include. If they include jiujitsu and laughter, I think we’ll all be all right.

February 23, 2015

The Worth of a Degree

Education is important. Nelson Mandela called it the most powerful weapon people can use to change the world, Abraham Lincoln said it was the most important task we could engage in as a people, and I say it’s the most important tool I’ve seen to improve the lives we all live.

Investing in education almost always pays off, for individuals and nations.

By the way, I use the term “education” broadly: some of the smartest people I know didn’t graduate from high school, and some of the dumbest have Ph.D degrees. If this sounds like a poetic exaggeration, I assure you I mean it literally. There are many ways to educate and improve yourself, with academic work being just one of them.

This month, after almost exactly four years of hard and consistent training. I earned my purple belt. I have a long way to go in my jiujitsu journey, but I’m so happy to have taken this step. The four-year mark is a nice coincidence, since it coincides with the amount of time it takes most people to complete something most people identify more clearly with education, an undergraduate college degree.

I have one of those, and believe me, I worked way harder to get the purple belt than I did to get my Bachelor of Arts. Sorry, professors, but it’s true.

My mom always valued education, so she made sure I finished my undergrad degree. Later, I went on and got a Master’s, and earned an honor or two along the way. I don’t talk about that stuff a lot, and the only reason I’m doing so now is to put it into context.

This is the context: it’s no exaggeration to say that I’m as proud of this belt as any of that academic work. It took that much work and that much sacrifice.

In order to obtain an education in jiujitsu, I had to make several investments: a lot of time, a ton of sweat and pain, and of course some money.

When I graduated from college in 1998, in-state students attending public four-year colleges paid $3,243 on average in tuition and fees. It’s a lot more now (and frankly, I think college should be free, as it is in many other countries).

That investment has paid for itself many times over in life experiences, in jobs I couldn’t have gotten without the degree. As the great musical philosopher Tom Lehrer once said, “Life is like a sewer: what you get out of it depends on what you put into it.”

I already told you that I had to work harder to get my purple belt than I did to get a college degree. Factoring in gym dues, seminars, privates, instructional materials and expenses from competing at tournaments, I’m fairly sure I spent more money along my path to purple belt, too.

(If anyone is really interested, I can break out those calculations. I frankly never even thought about it until now: when you’re doing something you love, you just kind of do it.)

Getting a black belt takes more than 10 years in most cases, time that’s roughly equivalent to getting a Ph.D. To me, the comparison between jiujitsu education and advanced degrees just illustrates the value of learning jiujitsu: the achievements we’re proudest of are the ones that are hardest to accomplish.

For students, we have to accept early on that getting where we want to go requires commitment. Why, then, do so many jiujitsu students shortchange themselves — and try to shortchange their instructors — on their martial arts education?

There are two parts to what I’m trying to say: the part that involves us as students of jiujitsu and the part that involves the way we relate to our instructors.

Primarily, what I want to say is this: as students, we should be maximizing our return on the investments we *do* make. If you’re paying dues to your school, why not take advantage of all the classes that are offered? It costs as much to train twice a week as it does five in most schools. Training as much as you can maximizes your return on investment.

Everyone has their own path to walk, and we all have different resources at our disposal. I’m not just talking about spending money here. Not everyone is fortunate enough to have the disposable income to go to every seminar, buy every DVD set or take privates consistently.

That’s why it’s important to acknowledge that there are different types of investments. Can’t afford seminars, but have time to stay after class? Get extra drilling in. Time is the most important investment you can make. Don’t have access to the gym? Do a spreadsheet or a mind map of the techniques you know. Jiujitsu is a long journey, but the more time you’re able to put in, the quicker and more rewarding it is.

The second part of this involves our instructors. This is a little trickier, as it always is when art and commerce intersect.

If we value a college education enough that we’re willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars on it, though, why wouldn’t we place a similar value on our continuing education in jiujitsu?

It’s tough to make a living running a jiujitsu school, and I’m always surprised when people do things like get out of paying gym dues. To a certain extent, I understand — everybody’s trying to get by, and since your instructor loves jiujitsu, he probably wants people to train.

Keep in mind that your instructor has to make a living, and your school has to stay open. If you like training, that’s a shared interest that’s well worth preserving.

Invest in your education, whatever path that takes. And invest in the people that help you keep learning. We all get better that way.

November 13, 2014

The Top 10 Things To Think About Before Your First Tournament

Some of my training partners are competing for the first time at Toro BJJ Presents US Grappling Greensboro this weekend. This is great, and I’m proud of all of the people who are stepping on the mat to compete. Jiu-jitsu competition has real benefits for your training, as this article by Jake Whitfield shows.

Partially for my friends, and partially for other folks who will dip their toes into tournament waters in the future, I thought I’d put together some advice. When you’re getting ready for your first tournament, here are 10 things I think you should consider.

10. Registration

Seems like it goes without saying, but put some thought into what division you want to enter. Many tournament offer both gi and no-gi divisions, some offer age groups, and most offer “absolute” divisions where you can compete against anyone of any weight class. In general, I advise entering as many divisions as you can: you’re in this to learn jiu-jitsu, and the more matches you get, the more you’ll learn. Besides, you can always drop out if you’re exhausted after one or two divisions, but you can’t enter new divisions the day of the event.

9. Preparation

Not just physical preparation through training, either. That part goes without saying, and your instructor and teammates know what you’ll need to do in training to get ready. For your part, make sure you show up ready to compete. Get a good night’s sleep beforehand. Pack a bag full of healthy food, water and other fluids, and whatever gear you’ll need. You never know what the food options will be at the event, and it’s best to have healthy fruit between matches rather than a greasy piece of pizza.

Your teammates will be proud of you when you compete, but may not have food and water for you to bum. BYO Acai Bowl.

8. Goals

Maybe you want to win every match (and good luck with that!). Maybe you have a lot of experience competing in other things and you know you enjoy the challenge. Or maybe this is your first real athletic experience, and you just want to see what it’s like. Your goals for the tournament depend on your own background and training. So be clear with yourself about what you expect from the experience.

7. Survival

If this is your first tournament, you’re probably a white belt, and if you’re a white belt, your focus should be to survive first. From there you can advance to the other aspects of the game. Jiu-jitsu is a defensive art, and surviving is a victory! If we look at success as a pyramid, with survival at the base and submitting your opponent on top, you have to start at the beginning. You can’t achieve success without surviving, so be sure your defensive game is tight.

Medals are awesome! It's tough to get them without good survival skills. — Medals are awesome! It’s tough to get them without good survival skills.

Most of the things I’ve listed so far are things I think that new competitors should think about and consider. The next few are specific techniques that work for me, and that I hope help you as well.

6. Best-Case Strategy

Have a plan for your match. While it’s unlikely that your match goes exactly the way you envision it, the very act of visualization helps. Multiple studies have shown that visualization improves athletic performance, and the practice of thinking through how you want your matches to go only helps remind you of the techniques you want to use.

For example, my first tournament I planned to do this: take my opponent down with a single leg; open and pass his guard with a stack pass; control him in side control; pass to mount using a knee drive; try to collar choke him from mount, and either finish, or force him to give me his back; and finally finish with a rear naked choke.

Exactly zero of my matches went this way, but I firmly believe that the tournament went better because I had a plan in place. What’s your plan in the ideal world? Even if we don’t live in the ideal world, you should be able to answer this question.

At least one match at my first tournament went kind of according to plan. And without a plan, that wouldn't have happened. — At least one match at my first tournament went kind of according to plan. And without a plan, that wouldn’t have happened.

5. Techniques For Each Major Position

Things go wrong. In the middle of life we lose a toe or we discover our girlfriend loves Nickelback. Jiu-jitsu matches are the same. So maybe you take your opponent down as you planned, but then she hip bump sweeps you, and whoops! You’re under mount.

Before my first tournament my goal was to have at least one, ideally two techniques that I knew from each major position. That way, even if I couldn’t escape the mount of a more skilled opponent, at least I wouldn’t feel like a flailing imbecile.

Because I’m proudly a nerd, I make spreadsheets of all the techniques I’ve learned broken down by position. This helps tell me what to drill, what I know fairly well and what I need to work on. For your first tournament, I’d suggest you get at least one or two good back escapes; mount escapes; side control escapes; guard sweeps; guard submissions; guard opens and passes; and submissions from the top. Again, focus on the defensive concepts and build upward.

Nerd alert. (And you should see the whole thing.)

4. Perspective

You’re going to be training a long time, and whatever results you get are just a small blip on that larger radar screen. Saulo Ribeiro is a legend, and he never won a tournament until he got his black belt. Don’t plan your UFC career if you win, and relax if you lose. Either way, try to improve next time.

3. Down Time

You should know that many tournaments will have you waiting for a long time before your division. This is especially true of white belts, who usually go last. This isn’t something you really plan for, unless you want to bring an MP3 player or a book, but something to be aware of.

2. Learning

Whatever happens, it’s not a wasted experience if you learn something — and you will. Consider having a friend videotape your matches, or at least take photographs. I’ve had perhaps 100 tournament matches, and was able to reconstruct what happened in most of them based on video and pictures. This will be very helpful to you down the road, so don’t miss that opportunity.

With luck, you will get some medals and not make a stupid face.

And the number one thing to think about before your first tournament is …

1. Nothing.

Just go out there and do it. Don’t stress yourself out too much: this is what you do for fun. As a wise man with ties to Durham once said: “Don’t think too much. It’ll only hurt the ball club.”

Good luck, have fun, stay safe, and go train.

September 14, 2013

When Do You Stop Feeling Incompetent? Five Answers.

When we finished up with a 6 a.m. drilling session the other day, one of my white belt training partners asked me a poignant question. “So,” he said, “when do you stop feeling incompetent at this?”

I laughed, and gave him a glib answer: “I’ll let you know when it happens to me.”

I feel like I owe him a better answer, though. This is a dedicated guy we’re talking about — not everyone gets up at 5:30 to drill with me — and honestly, everyone has felt that way. Jiu-jitsu is so complex and multifaceted that there is always some aspect of it giving you trouble.

This post is my effort to get past that flippant first-thought answer and think through five legitimate responses to that question.

1. Even The Basics Come Hard: Accept That. It took me three classes to learn to shrimp. Not shrimp perfectly. Not shrimp well. To understand the basic mechanics of one of the art’s most fundamental movements enough that I could actually do it. Seriously, that took me three classes. It took me several nights and personal attention from the instructor before I could participate in the very first warmup.

Eminem's reaction to watching my first attempts at shrimping. — Eminem’s reaction to watching my first attempts at shrimping.

I tell this story for two reasons: first, take heart! Even if you totally brainlock on the simplest things, a little patience can get you where you want to be. Second, get some perspective. These movements are counter-intuitive. We don’t grow up moving like a shrimp does: it has to be learned. It takes some of us (like me) longer than others, and that’s fine.

2. Everything is Relative. I was fortunate enough to go to the Mundials as a white belt after training a little over a year. I hadn’t competed outside of North Carolina, and it was an incredible experience.

One remarkable aspect of watching the best in the world: you’d see a guy mow through competition with a smile on his face. You’d think that he was invincible.

Then you’d see him get schooled in the next match. Then you’d see the guy that beat him lose. And then you think again about that first guy, and how he could tap you 10 times in a five minute round without using his hands.

It’s all relative. Even now, I’ll hear an incredible instructor remark after training with someone like Royce Gracie or Gui Valente: “Wow, he really makes me feel like I don’t know jiu-jitsu.” Compared to a day-one white belt, a very good white belt can feel like a fount of information. Compared to someone who has been training 30 years since childhood, a very good black belt can feel like a white belt.

1011343_10151555296083483_2112042903_n — Either of the two guys on the end could submit me 10 times, blindfolded, with each hand in their belt. BJJ has levels.

There will be days when you feel like you’re getting this. Then there will be days when you feel like me during my second class, trying to shrimp.

By now my training partner is probably saying “enough with the platitudes. Give me a number.” OK. Done stalling. I’ll give it a shot.

3. About 18 Months. Once you train for about a year and a half, you’ll feel like you have a good handle on the basics. Depending upon how much you go to class, you might earn a blue belt slightly before or slightly after this time. Again, everyone is different. Some people have natural aptitude for grappling, and you can get there faster by spending more time on the mats, taking privates, watching videos, reading books, or whatever supplemental effort is best for your learning style.

But if you go to class regularly (say, three to five times a week) and do your drilling, you’ll build a solid foundation for yourself. You’ll start to recognize mistakes other white belts are making. This will help you first stop making those mistakes yourself, and then start exploiting those mistakes.

This is a really fun and exciting time in your development, and I think you’ll really enjoy it. I had an absolute blast when this happened for me, and it happened probably around the 18 month mark. That’s the good news.

Yes, there’s bad news.

4. … And Then You’ll Start Feeling Incompetent Again. Right after I got my blue belt, I felt euphoric. And so should you when you level up! It’s the result of a lot of work, sacrifice and effort, and you should be proud of it.

And then you should forget about what belt you have on and get right back to training. Because after you’ve had that belt a year, you’ll look back and can’t believe how little that dude who got that belt knew.

Everyone is making progress all the time. Other people — your training partners, your opponents — are getting better. You’ll feel good about where you’re at, but the rising tide means you’ve got to keep learning or get left behind.

Hey, I got good at the double under pass! I'll just keep doing ... ah, crap. — Hey, I got good at the double under pass! I’ll just keep doing … ah, crap.

That’s a beautiful thing, though! If you get good at the triangle choke, let’s say, your partners must adapt. Eventually, they will stop you from triangling them. Then, you’ll be forced to either figure out new setups or use a different technique. This, in turn, forces you to learn and improve.

The down side to this is that you end up feeling like a doofus. But that’s why the wise jiu-jiteiros tell the new guys that it’s important to keep the ego in check.

The art will do that for you, don’t worry. Last weekend I had perhaps the best tournament I’ve ever had. This week I got back and trained with some guys so good, they thwarted everything I was doing and submitted me multiple times without breathing hard. It’s inspiring, and humbling, to roll with people whose technique is at the level where it makes you feel utterly ineffectual and incompetent.

This brings us back to:

5. I’ll Let You Know When It Happens. Sorry, man, we’re back to the beginning.

Maybe, as the Buddhist meditation master Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche told Allen Ginsberg, the first thought really is the best thought. Or maybe jiu-jitsu is just so rich and complicated that I’m always going to feel like a novice.

If you saw me try to shrimp, you’d probably bet on the latter, and I probably would too.

That’s the thing, though: ultimately, you’re competing against yourself. The you of today is no doubt miles more competent than the day one version. And you’re only getting better.

There will always be people that make you feel like you have no technique compared to them. But when I think back on the version of myself that walked into the gym about three years ago, I have no doubt that I would tune him up without him even realizing what I was doing.

We all feel lost sometimes. Part of why jiu-jitsu is so interesting is that there will always be more of it to understand. Embrace that, and enjoy the ride.

Tag: advice