The Most Important Lesson From My "Useless" Journalism Degree

It has nothing to do with journals. Or "isms".

Feb 10, 2023

When I started Jiu-Jitsu, I was 17. I was about to go to college.

It was love from the first choke. After about 6 months of training, I knew that I wanted to Jiu-Jitsu as much as I could for as long as I could. The problem was that there was a big obstacle in my way.

The obstacle was called “school”.

I wanted to drop out of college and become an international grappling prodigy, but my parents convinced me to stay in school. I finished my bachelor’s degree in 2020 at Loyola University Chicago.

Admittedly, I got a kind of stupid (and embarrassingly easy) degree in “broadcast journalism”, but I finished school. I got the piece of paper.

For 2 years, I thought that my college degree was a total waste of resources. I didn’t see how the knowledge I accrued in university was ever going to help me in my real life — the life I’m now living.

This made me resentful for quite some time. For the entirety of the 5 years I slogged through college, I longed for a time when I could just “focus on Jiu-Jitsu” and train as much as I wanted to.

I thought college was kind of stupid. I hated going, the work was dumb, and I shot myself in the foot and wasted a lot of my time in school studying Jiu-Jitsu techniques on my laptop instead of actually learning. I’ll be the first to admit: I was kind of a brat when it came to school.

However, when I look back over the last few years and the trajectory my life has taken, I’ve realized that the “stupid” college degree I got is something that has completely changed my life.

Here’s the story of how I learned the value of my education, and how it might help you realize the value of things in your life that you aren’t particularly excited about.

When I was 4, I tried to fight my school principal.

Hating college wasn’t a new thing for me. I hated school from the moment I started going.

I got diagnosed with ADHD at 22, but that wasn’t really surprising to me or anyone in my family. It was more of an “aha!” moment, where more than a decade of strange academic experiences — like all the times my teachers told me I was “a dumb jock” (or something similar) or the time when I tried to enlist fisticuffs on the principal at the British school I went to when I was 4 — all started to make sense.

Sports were always my outlet. I always wanted to find a sport that I could play professionally. Unconsciously, I think that was always my “career plan”, it just took some digging to find a sport that I wasn’t terrible at (wrestling).

It took even longer to find a sport that I could do professionally (Jiu-Jitsu).

When I found Jiu-Jitsu, I first just loved it because it was just so much fun. Then, when I realized that I was actually kind of good at Jiu-Jitsu, I longed to make the sport my entire life.

This was when the tension between me and college really started to build.

I relished the idea of dropping out, but I was too scared to really do it.

Dropping out of college and forging my own path as an athlete/martial artist to me seemed like the ultimate “f*ck you” to the education system that I felt had done me wrong.

But my parents motivated me to keep going.

I didn’t understand at the time, but I kept going anyway. I felt that I owed it to my family to be educated. I was smart enough to realize the fragility of an athlete’s career from a young age, so I stuck with the school thing. I knew that one twist and pop of the knee or shoulder could completely alter my life, especially in a demanding sport like grappling.

Deep down, however, I still loved the idea of dropping out of college to pursue my passion, so I made a compromise.

I learned how to balance school with Jiu-Jitsu, just like I had with sports when I was a kid. When I was in college, I lived basically the same way I did in high school. The locations were different and the routines were different, but my mindset was the same as it always had been.

I was a “student-athlete”, even if I wasn’t on the basketball team.

But over the course of my time in college (when I was around 19 or 20), something strange started to happen.

I won’t call myself an intellectual because it’d be an insult to true intellectuals, but toward the end of college, I began to develop an “intellectual curiosity”. At times, the passion I felt for learning about the world became as strong as the passion I had for learning Jiu-Jitsu.

I still hated going to school and doing my homework, but I became addicted to learning.

I did my coursework in school, but I also started diving into other, more advanced subjects as well, like psychology, marketing, history, and science, thanks to books, documentaries, and podcasts. I started learning as much as I could about everything I could digest.

Except for math though, f*ck math.

That passion for learning that I developed has given me everything I have now.

For a long time in my athletic career, I thought that dropping out of college would take me to the next level.

This is how everyone around me made it seem.

Then, I won a world title in Jiu-Jitsu while I was still in school — something “they” (most people in the Jiu-Jitsu world) said couldn’t be done. They said there was no way someone could beat people who were training like professionals while I was still being a student and doing internships and homework.

And? They were wrong about this. I proved that.

I started to think about what else they might have been wrong about.

When I finished college, I started writing random stories on the internet about my life. I got a few followers and a few million views on Quora and Twitter and some newsletter subscribers, but most importantly, I got writing jobs and I have created opportunities that have been able to support my passions in martial arts, in addition to learning a new skill.

A lot of the guys in the Jiu-Jitsu world go home from the gym and play video games, whereas I’ve spent the last 5 years of my life going home, reading, writing, and learning.

Fine. I’m a nerd. But I’m a nerd who’s doing really well right now because I spent the last 5 years pushing my brain as well as my body.

Balancing writing and fighting, as I am right now, doesn’t feel like work for me. It feels like the only way I’ve ever lived my life.

Only now, I finally get paid to do this.

Still, I struggled a lot over the years to make things “work”.

After every semester in college, I still threw a fit like a giant baby and almost dropped out.

I was constantly overwhelmed with life from 18 until 23 when I finally finished school.

In school, I did Jiu-Jitsu 6–7 days per week, often 2–3 times per day. I also went to classes and did homework. I also did internships.

Also, when I was doing all this, I wasn’t considered a “real athlete” by my school, people on the internet, or even myself at times. There were zero perks during this period.

I was an amateur.

I did a lot of shit, and I accomplished a lot of cool things that I’m proud of, but I was also a complete mess.

Despite being a fairly high-level athlete, I wasn’t super healthy — physically or mentally. I was constantly overworked, I barely slept, my diet sucked, and my constant feelings of overwhelm made me feel incredibly alone. I drove myself into the ground over and over again in the name of “making it all work”.

And? I kind of did it.

I made it all work, and the payoff was great when I did.

However, more important than just the achievements completed and medals won were lessons I learned from trying to manage as much stuff as I could. I couldn’t see this till years later.

Everything I did in that period of my life taught me that I was capable of a lot more than I thought. I never realized how much I was selling myself short until I tried to give everything I had to something. I never knew how much I had until I decided to leave no stone unturned.

But still, this isn’t the most important lesson that made everything worth it.

The important lesson that I learned from school is that pursuing lifelong learning is the real key to long-term success and happiness.

When you stop learning, your dreams start to slip away.

Without that period of my life where I learned how to “embrace the suck” a little bit and keep learning while fighting, I wouldn’t be fighting people all over the world right now and writing about it. I wouldn't have the mental fortitude to balance all the things I’m doing now.

My learning would have stopped a long time ago.

Closing Thoughts

We all have things in our lives that we don’t want to do.

For some of us, it’s crappy jobs or dealing with annoying bosses. For me, it was going to school (and then after that, crappy jobs with annoying bosses). Trying to balance things I hate with things I love has given me the skill set to make more money, do more of what I love, and experience the world in a way that a lot of people never will get to.

I get to travel the world and do martial arts, all because I decided to persist through a few years of suck.

If I gave up on my education a few years ago, I promise you that right now I’d be too broke to do what I do now, and I wouldn't be smart enough to figure out a way to fix that.

I’ll get off my soapbox now, but I want to leave you with this thought:

How is something that you hate doing today going to make you stronger, smarter, and better tomorrow?

Sometimes, you have to dig to answer that question, but the answer is almost always there. Unless you’re a masochist (which is a different conversation for a different day), there’s almost always deeper meaning in the things that we hate doing the most.

Stop avoiding stuff that sucks. It might just change your life.