The Not-So-Subtle Art of Kind of Giving a F*ck
On refilling your gas tank.
The last few months have been non-stop. Hard training, hard work, moving, and constant traveling —all the time.
I’ve been on the road nearly every week for the last 4 months, either training, spending time with my girlfriend, teaching a seminar, competing, or a mixture of all of these. The weekend before last weekend’s ADCC Trials in Poland was my first weekend home without a competition or seminar since I moved to Austin in July.
The last few months have been especially crazy, and as I write this article, overlooking the Amalfi Coast, sipping a Diet Coke, and trying to digest and reflect on everything I’ve seen, felt, and experienced, I’m not quite sure where to start.
I took 3rd at last weekend’s ADCC Trials in Poland, and while I’m hoping that that good result is a sign of momentum, not a pinnacle, I’m really just making an effort to enjoy today. In the last few months, I’ve been lost, hopeless, triumphant, broken, happy, and everything in between. It’s been a lot to handle.
I’ve had so many successes and failures this year that I don’t really feel attached to the m anymore. I care about my crafts, but I’m not attached to any outcomes anymore.
My priorities are extremely selective.
This is the art of kind of giving a f*ck.
Output is important, but it only takes you so far.
I have had a long, tumultuous relationship with the idea of “hard work”.
On one hand, hard work has given me pretty much all of the good things in my life. My Jiu-Jitsu skills, my writing skills, my relationship, and my self-confidence are just a few things that I’ve earned the right to have in my life through working hard at them.
But hard work alone doesn’t give you the thing you want. What you really need is quality.
I have mental measures that I must reach in order to maximize quality in what I do:
When I compete in Jiu-Jitsu, I am comfortable with failure if and only if I have given everything I possibly can to the preparation for the competition and in the competition itself.
When I write an article, I am comfortable with it “performing badly” if I have given everything I possibly can to that particular piece. I’m okay with having ideas ripped to shreds if I can confidently say that I’ve done my best.
I’m okay with losing as long as I’ve tried as hard as I possibly can before the loss occurs.
Most people, in my experience, don’t think like this. Most people just fear failure, all the time.
Most people care too much about the wrong things.
I also aim to remove “desire” from my life as much as possible.
Too much desire inherently creates scarcity, which creates anxiety, which creates unhealthy attachment, which creates irrational behavior.
To put it bluntly, people do dumb sh*t when they want to stuff too badly.
They use people. They hurt people. They abuse themselves. They hurt themselves. It’s a terrible cycle.
If you want everything, you’ll have nothing. If you want one thing, you can probably have it — or at least some close iteration of it — but there’s a cost. This is not an option, it is a requirement.
Everything has a cost, even happiness. Even love. Even peace.
I don’t agree with the Buddhist concept that all desire must be removed for true self-transcendence, but I do think that controlling your desires is a requirement for both happiness and optimal performance. I believe and have experienced that the optimal human experience comes from focusing and controlling your desires.
Excess is bad, but abundance is good.
Your desire is powerful. You can either use it to do great things, or it will use you to do terrible things.
How this applies to me:
This week since I’m out of town, I’ve been getting a lot of messages about where I am and what I’m doing next.
That’s what happens whenever I take a few days off and go on a holiday.
I get messages like:
“When’s your next competition?”, “When are you coming back to training?”, or, perhaps my least favorite, “Make sure you don’t gain too much weight while you’re away…” — as if when I am not training I’m off somewhere snorting coke and injecting melted ice cream into my veins.
As if I’m caving into “weakness” by not working my ass off all the time. These messages also tend to come from people who don’t have the same output as me on a regular basis, but that’s a different issue.
The true issue is the mentality that people have about their outputs, their lives, and their perception of themselves.
The “grind all-the-time mentality” is, I think, a very American (but not limited to Americans) way of thinking — the notion that we always have to be doing something productive — and I struggle with it a lot myself. I struggle to really get into “relaxation mode” for several days after a trip begins. I want to work — every single day. Without it, I face a bit of what I can only describe as an identity crisis.
That’s why recovery periods for me tend to still have a bit of work — some writing here or there, walking/hiking/swimming, and reading, but the intensity is severely moderated.
This, in my experience, is what balance really looks like. This is what really makes me happy.
Closing Thoughts
On one hand, hard work is a requirement to become good at a skill.
Hard work is how you improve your life. However, if you don’t take the time every once in a while to slow down and smell the pizza (MJ and I are going for pizza tonight and I can’t f*cking wait), you won’t be able to remember what it tastes like.
It’s a balance, and as an athlete, writer, and self-employed entrepreneur, most of the people who read my work and who I spend time with are pretty self-motivated. We all work hard, and we all suck at resting. We’re good at doing things, but we suck at enjoying things.
But luckily, if you’re a hard worker, you’re closer than you think to the greatest joys imaginable — you just need to care a bit less about results, and a bit more about experience.
You’re halfway to peace, but you won’t get there till you take your foot off the gas.
“The sweetest pleasures are those which are hardest to be won.”― Casanova
More from this week:
If you enjoyed reading this post, share it with friends! Or, click on the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack!
SO GOOD! Thank you!