Discipline - On the Art of Jiu Jitsu and Why You Need to Keep Showing Up

Welcome to the grind, everyday, all day, tomorrow and the next day. You don’t even bother to look at the time anymore, ticks of the little hand might as well be New York minutes and sometimes they pass by so slow you might as well be moving backwards. The clock no longer is for or against you, it just acts as a marker file left by some cruel executable that won’t stop running. Showing up undeterred everyday, even if you love what you do can sometimes take the same resolve as holding your hands over an open flame.

Some people begin Jiu Jitsu and are already really good. Like the world is some strange video game and they put all their attribute points into the grappling category before the quest even started. Craft is not competition, it’s the endless pursuit to get better even if you’re already good or if good isn’t the easiest option for you. Talent has a weird way of showing up after a thousand or so training sessions.

Don’t worry how you did that last round, worry about how you did this week. Get ready for practice but prepare for what you want to accomplish this month.
How fucking sick do you want to be when you do get that black belt? How many rolls did you accumulate by the time your body finally won’t let you wrestle anymore. Disregard the countless hours, broken fingers and all the party nights you traded so you could be meticulous.

If you want technique and proficiency to be fat chapters in the book you’re writing, just know there will be spans of writer’s block; no matter how bad you want to create, sometimes the words just don’t make it to the paper. Be bulletproof in a world that fires discouragement with 16 inch guns. Let the artillery bounce off of you and show up everyday with wide smile from one cauliflowered ear to the other.

It might be all fun and games but discipline is the price you pay for lifetime entry. Get tapped by a lower rank, laugh, take notes and go again. Get stuck on the bottom for months, map out all the dead ends for escape you can find.  Injuries don’t mean you don’t show up, you just try and find new ways to learn.

It would be nice to get 6 hours of sleep before work but you’ll settle for 4 ½ after you finish those two loads of laundry. The weekend comes and it might seem nice to stay in bed next to some good looking naked body, but the alarm gets set for before the sun is up and your bags are already packed.

Being an artist comes the burden of dealing with your failed attempts and less than mediocre performances; brilliant efforts can sometimes be the follow up to getting smashed. If you keep retying your belt then your best and worst productions are surely ahead of you. Sometimes the coldest streaks last for weeks, like your A game went on vacation and left you with nothing but the sound of your own tapping hand. Nothing works for you, everything is working for everyone else.

You’re always your own biggest critic, the voice in your head sometimes fucks with you the most, and boy does that voice sure now how to push your buttons. “You’re a goddamn whatever belt and been training for so long and its not fair to have days like this when it just doesn’t come together. If you’re this bad today whats the point of coming back tomorrow? So-and-so just got you with the same move three times in the same roll and he’s a rank below you. Maybe its time to take up racquet ball?” You can’t always mute that voice or help but feel discouraged; sometimes the discipline to say fuck it and just keep showing up is the only solution.

John Travolta played James Ubriacco in Look Who’s Talking Now (the third installment of the Look Who’s Talking films) right before he got to be Vincent Vega in Pulp fiction. All artistry and craft are subject to this type of lows and self-doubt, the trick is to keep punching the time card and gearing up to do it all again tomorrow, you don’t want your last training session to be the equivalent of a movie about talking pets. There is always the chance to learn from falling short, but in grappling that opportunity can fucking hurt. The voice of discipline is the only one that says how great it is to examine how you just got brutally owned so you can rebuild and repeat. Jiu jitsu is a close quarters game, so frequently violent with its lessons and reminders.

It might be hard to sign your name and claim your best effort. You might wonder what people will think or how they will react but when referring to all types of art it is more important to attempt and create than it is to get a reaction. The path to success more often than not riddled with failure and moments you’re not too proud of. It takes that same discipline to lay it all out and show your shit to the world, not just your best shit, all that shit, every idea and every effort, every time you tapped and every time you hit that sweet step over arm-bar.

We all will watch those with great potential and the most coveted of mental and physical gifts step off the mat for the last time as they don’t have the discipline to keep coming back. That voice in your head has all sorts of reasons you shouldn’t be grappling:

“I don’t have the time for this now.”
“I can’t really afford Jiu Jitsu.”
“I am worried about getting hurt.”
“I am a person who is either 100% in or 100% out and I can’t commit now”
“I wanna get in shape before I start training.”
“I am too old… too small… too weak….I…. I…. I…”

Discipline tells that voice to go fuck it self (which is weird because that voice is actually you talking and that’s like you telling yourself to go fuck yourself… but whatever). Discipline puts a gun in the face of all the doubts, all the aches and pains, all the poor performances and roadblocks. Discipline wakes you up early, it gets you there the next day, it helps with all the laundry and reminds you how much potential you have, even though voices might tell you otherwise. It sees a you, years from now who is a bad mother fucker, with funny ears, and a worn out black belt. It wants you to remember the many people that didn’t make it as long as you.