10 Ideas That Will Rapidly Accelerate Your Skill Development
I use these ideas every day on and off the mat.
In the time that I have been doing Jiu-Jitsu, my approach to training and improving has changed a lot.
First, like every beginner, I was clueless.
Then, in the early days of my competitive career, I was very results-oriented and obsessed with winning — even in practice. Then, beginning around 2022, I was very experience-oriented. It was my pushback to my former self being so results-obsessed.
Nowadays, I’m more process and skill-oriented in my approach. The mindset and approach that I have to training (and building other skills in my life as well) has become oriented around processes and systems.
The goal is not to win everything all the time (although I’ll never stop trying), the goal is to always be improving my skills. If I do this, I believe I will reach the highest levels.
Here are 10 principles that help me stay focused on improving my skills day after day.
Quantity to quality, then quality over quantity.
Last year, I competed 14 times in Jiu-Jitsu in 9 different rulesets.
This year, by the end of it, I’ll have only competed 7 times. However, my performances this year have been way better than my performances last year. Last year, I used quantity to build quality, and this year I focused on quality using the previously acquired quantity to give me my knowledge base.
In writing, I do the same thing. Earlier this year, I did 12-15 Twitter threads per week, ghostwriting 2000-word blog posts, and running my content business.
Now?
I have fewer clients and fewer headaches, but work is better. That’s in part because of the grind — the quantity. Put a lot of volume now so you can focus on quality later on.
Become undefinable.
We live in a world today where you can redefine your identity and do more than ever before.
You can be an artist, an athlete, and an entrepreneur all in the same day. In Jiu-Jitsu, you can be a wrestler, a judoka, and a leg locker all in the same sequence. I don’t want to be easily defined by other people — I want to avoid boxes.
I want to have consistent change and development from myself. Constant evolution.
My late grandfather was a doctor, a scratch golfer, a musician, a painter, and a family man — among other things. The good life today is not easily defined by one skill or accomplishment.
Welcome to the rise of the generalist. It’s never going away.
Commit to a vague goal you’ll never reach.
My main goal with Jiu-Jitsu is mastery of grappling.
What does that look like? How will I know I’ve reached it? Has anyone ever reached that before?
I don’t know. The vague goal of “mastery”, however, is a very strong motivator. It gives me a lot to work for.
More importantly, it allows me to set hundreds of smaller goals. Competitions, teaching, and sharing ideas in this newsletter are all just parts of the pursuit of that vague goal of mastery.
Use a vague vision as the driving force to set specific goals that you can achieve.
Be skeptical of trends and the status quo.
Don’t be afraid to go “off-meta” — both in your Jiu-Jitsu and in your life.
For a while, I thought that the guard was dead. I also thought that digital writing was dying and becoming too saturated. I thought I was weird and doomed to fail because I was trying to build a writing business in addition to being a professional athlete.
Why did I think these things? Because they were trends that were popular for people to talk about and they were the status quo.
However, the truth is that trends are just incomplete data based on the information that people have at hand. They are helpful guides but they are not necessarily true.
The game is always changing. You can be whatever you’d like, but not if you believe wholeheartedly in what everyone else is believing.
Work like a woodpecker.
Most people are all over the place with their training and skill development.
They don’t have strengths because they want everything to be their strength.
Instead of being okay at a bunch of things, work hard on one specific area of the skill for an extended period. The way that you become well-rounded is not by working on everything all the time, it’s by having jagged edges and slowly but surely working them away.
Work consistently on one thing and then move on to the next.
“A woodpecker can tap twenty times on a thousand trees and get nowhere, but stay busy. Or he can tap twenty-thousand times on one tree and get dinner.” — Seth Godin
Good rest is better than low-quality work.
Not every day is going to be a good day, but it’s key to control your input.
If you are unable to give good input into your work or training, you might be better off just resting. When you ignore the warning signs that you need a break in training or fitness, you risk injury. In art and creativity, you just risk low-quality output and frustration.
Good rest, on the other hand, can be a superpower to quick excellence. Sometimes when I’m well rested I feel like I have an unfair advantage, when the truth is that all I did was the smart thing.
Every action is shaping you into what you will become.
For the last several years, I have wanted to be a professional writer and professional grappler.
This means that every morning, I wake up and write. Usually for about 2 hours. I write in a journal, I do content for clients, books, newsletters, social content, and more. I am not a writer because I call myself one, I am a writer because I practice every day.
Likewise, I’m not a “pro” in Jiu-Jitsu because I call myself one, I am one because I show up every single day and train.
Every action shapes your identity and this does not stop until you do.
Pursue skills over outcomes.
Whenever I compete nowadays, I set additional goals besides just my goal of winning the match or tournament.
For PGF, one of my main goals was to win a match in regulation via arm triangle or back control. This was because in a match a few weeks before, I failed to do this. At PGF, I managed to accomplish this.
Although I didn’t win the whole tournament, I was able to execute the new skills that I have been building. I’m confident that I am a better athlete and grappler than I was 6 or even 3 months ago.
I’m developing skills.
Intelligent risks are rewarded — not always directly.
Sometimes, when you compete in a tournament, you lose.
You feel bad, you look bad, and you experience failure. Competing (or testing yourself in any way) is always a risk.
Likewise, writing is always a risk. The risk of being vulnerable, of having people not like what you say, or just doing bad work. I’m well aware that not all of my articles are bangers.
But in the long run, each attempt fuels progress, which fuels better work. As long as you’re not being reckless, risks are good. They help you learn, improve, and continue building your skills.
Instead of being “risk averse”, build your risk appetite.
Everything can be systemized.
The biggest lesson I learned about grappling from writing is that everything can be built into a system.
When I wrote for a ghostwriting agency, my clients and coworkers were obsessed with finding the best systems to produce high-quality content. When I’ve worked with strength coaches, I’ve been able to identify systems in their programming and structure. The same is true with diet, business, self-education, and more.
If you are not systemizing these things so that you can improve more efficiently, you are dabbling. That’s okay, but it’s not optimal for growth.
Anything I want to do excellently, I systemize.
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This week we’re joined by Fiona Geisinger!
Fiona is the founder of Athletic Arts and is a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt training out of Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
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