During COVID and these past few months I really wanted to get involved in something outside of specifically work and working out as my outlet. Finding more options to feed into my formula of Stress + Rest = Growth. I recently started training in Jiu Jitsu and to be honest have absolutely fallen in love. Jiu Jitsu has provided a path for my curiosity and state of always wanting to learn/develop. I am fascinated by human development; learning something new, getting into an environment that positively drives personal growth, and being coached.
In the process of learning more about the sport. I recently listened to the Lex Fridman Podcast where he interviews John Danaher. John Danaher has been described as one of the greatest minds and coaches in the MMA world. As a coach, scholar and educator of Jiu Jitsu, submission grappling, judo, MMA and martial arts (credit: Lex Fridman Podcast). Within the interview of over three hours there was a short snippet on what has made the difference between John’s success’s and failures. I have linked the snippet in the article with all credit to Lex, his podcast team, and John Danaher. It was too good to not share.
Really the biggest take away from this snippet is how can we take this idea and the foundation of the persistence of hard thinking and apply this to our life? For example applying this not to only to my Jiu Jitsu but also to the creation of value for others. As I create threads, newsletter, blog, podcast, etc how can use the tools below to improve my craft for writing and impacting others. How am I practicing the persistence of hard thinking to craft more engaging and educational content for my audience. Having my mind be more exhausted than my body as I create, revise, edit, and connect. Or even outside of Jiu Jitsu and my writing, this applies to many things within our life.
Where in your life is your mind buzzing for the possibilities of tomorrow?
Persistence of Hard Thinking
Hard thinking in finding more efficient ways make progress instead of only expressing the doggedness of showing up doing the same thing for 5 years.
Too Tough/Too Boring
Progression of short/long term goals for training that is engaging, where when skill starts to rise, challenge rises.
Typically people leave something if it is too tough or too boring
Mind > Body
End of a good training session your mind should be more exhausted than your body.
Coming out of training with your mind buzzing on possibilities for tomorrow.
Training session does not stop until your mind stops and your mind should never stop.
Once again, all credit goes to these two. Hope you found something useful and applicable to your situation. Grateful for the opportunity to engage with this podcast interview and reflect on how I can improve my skill of hard thinking.
Lex: What makes the difference between the successful, your successes and your failures as a coach,
John: A range of reasons, the single most important is persistence. People will point to all kinds of virtues amongst athletes. This guy's the most courageous. This guy's the strongest, this guy, these are all virtues, but the one indispensable virtue is persistence. The ability just to stay in the game long enough to get the results you seek.
Lex: But what does persistence really look like? If we can just break that apart a little bit? Yeah.
John: It's actually, this is a great question you're asking because most people see it as a kind of simplistic doggedness where you just show up every day. That's not it the most important form of persistence, persistence of thinking, which looks to push you and increasingly efficient, more and more efficient methods of training. Famously people talk about the idea that the hardest work of all is hard thinking. And they're absolutely right. Okay. Coming into the gym and just doing the same thing for a decade, isn't going to make you better. What's going to make you better is progressive training over time where you identify clear goals marked out in time increments three months, six months, 12 months, five years, and build those short-term goals into a program of long-term goals.
John: Making sure that the training program changes over time. So there's your skill level rises. The challenges you face in the gym become higher and higher. Don't kill them at the start with challenges that are too hot for have to deal with. They get discouraged and leave, build them slowly over, but make sure they don't just get left in a swamp where they're just doing the same thing. They were doing three years ago and they get bored. And there's two ways you can leave in a gym. You can leave from adversity was too tough. We can leave from boredom. Everyone talks about the first, no one talks about the second. Most people. When they get to black belt, they get bored. They know what their game is.
John: They know what they're good at and know what they're not good at when they compete, they stick with what they're good at. And they avoid what they're not good at. Yeah. And they get bored. They reach a plateau. And that's it. My whole thing is to make sure it's not so tough at the start that they leave because of adversity. And then for the rest of their career to make sure it's not boring. So they leave because of boredom.
Lex: Travis Dean he actually said something that changed the way I see training. He said it as a side comment, but he said that at the end of a training at the end of a good training session, your mind should be exhausted. Not your body and I've for most of my life saw good training sessions where my body was exhausted.
John: Yes. I believe that's the case with most people. Yeah. Yeah. You should come out of the training session with your mind, buzzing with ideas like possibilities for tomorrow. And by the way, on that note, I would go further and say that the training session doesn't finish when your body stops moving, it finishes when your mind stops moving and your mind shouldn't stop moving. After their session, there should be analysis. What do I do? Well, what did I do badly? How could I do better with the things that I did?
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