The Secret to Serial Productivity
How to be everything, everywhere, all at once.
When I was younger, I was told I had to choose what I wanted to be when I grew up.
It was an impossible decision.
At different times in my childhood, I wanted to be:
a baseball player
a detective
a film director
the owner of a diner
I always had different ideas for random jobs or careers I could have when I became an adult. I was extremely excited to finish school and start working.
There was just one big problem with me trying to determine what I was going to be when I grew up:
I couldn’t make a decision. I was petrified.
Today, I am 27. I’m a professional Jiu-Jitsu athlete, an instructor, a digital writer, a ghostwriter, and now, as of Monday, an author.
Here’s how I turned my obsession with lifestyle design into a multi-faceted career that feels more play than work.
It started at 18 when I fell in love with Jiu-Jitsu.
I did not fall in love with Jiu-Jitsu on the first day.
My pride was too strong — you can probably thank my wrestling background for that.
Either way, I wanted to be an MMA fighter.
I started training Jiu-Jitsu at 17 as a senior in high school (just twice a week or so), and when I moved away to college I fell deeply in love with Jiu-Jitsu, grappling, training, and competing. I just wanted to be as good as possible and see how far down the rabbit hole I could go.
After my first year of college, I started to have this painful realization:
To be great at Jiu-Jitsu, I needed to train multiple times a day pretty much every day. I also needed money to pay for training, competition, and the lifestyle that I wanted to live.
My parents are incredible people who supported me in chasing this dream (they even paid for a few tournament entry fees in the early days), but the Wojcik’s aren’t made of money. I had to grow up a bit.
I wanted to earn money without giving up on my dream.
I’ve always been pretty frugal, but initially, I had no income from Jiu-Jitsu. Jiu-Jitsu cost me money for years before I saw anything back.
The problem was that I wanted to be really good at Jiu-Jitsu but I needed to be able to live as well.
Unfortunately, I also grew up too comfortably to be able to sleep on a mat or in a gym for more than a couple of days.
If there’s anything my girlfriend says that I hate but secretly agree with it’s that I am a boujee man. I like my sparkling water, fluffy blankets, and air conditioning.
At 22, I started writing for a lawn care company.
The Jiu-Jitsu thing triggered my obsession with lifestyle design.
I read every book on solopreneurship, easy startups, and lifestyle design I could get my hands on. I watched all the YouTubers and all the creators and all the podcasts. I tried to dance around the problems I was having for years.
I started managing social media for small businesses. This became my first freelancing business while I was writing on Medium on the side. I started at one client — a lawn care company — and I worked my way up to 11.
I wrote for trucking companies, digital marketing agencies, and even a jerk chicken restaurant.
This got me to a livable wage (barely) for a crap ton of weekly hours. Still, thanks to making my own schedule and working hard, I was able to train Jiu-Jitsu every day, compete often, travel a bit, and climb the ranks in the competitive Jiu-Jitsu world.
This period of my life was not without sacrifices:
I lost a lot of former friends due to my obsession with training, writing, and working
I lived very frugally in a shitty studio apartment
I accrued a lot of injuries
I failed a lot on my own dime
Relationships were completely out of the question
However, the sacrifices were worth in hindsight (although it doesn’t it didn’t always feel like it at the time) because they pushed me closer to the life that I am to live now.
I’ve always had to juggle everything.
Whenever I would travel and train with other grapplers, the days never had enough action for me.
We’d train and then rest for several hours. Then we’d train again. Then we’d rest again.
Some days, we’d train once and do nothing the rest of the day.
Here’s the hard truth about Jiu-Jitsu development (that applies to other skills as well):
Everyone used to say that you have to train for 6 hours a day to be good. I used to believe that I couldn’t win without 2-3 sessions every single day.
Nowadays, I believe the opposite. I believe that 2-3 sessions per day is likely shortening a lot of young grappler’s careers.
If you’re like most people, 2-4 hours per day is more than likely enough to help you get better.
You need to build skills outside of your main skill. You need to be well-rounded.
I generally spend 3-4 hours per day devoted to becoming a better Jiu-Jitsu practitioner and I have become one of the best in the world. I spend about 3 hours per day writing and I have made a full-time income from writing multiple times. 3 hours a day is enough for me to write this newsletter, ghostwrite, and work on other projects as well.
This is not a sob story about how hard I have had it or how hard I have worked. If anything, it’s the opposite.
I am a massive believer that you can be and do multiple things. You can have it all in some form or iteration. Most people are allowing their limiting beliefs about what they can do or be to hold them back from even trying.
The way to be everything, everywhere, all at once is to simply believe that you can.
There’s one more key factor to organizing a high-paced lifestyle.
My subheader is a lie.
Okay, maybe not a lie, but an exaggeration.
You can’t be everything, everywhere, all at once. I really liked that movie but I don’t think a normal person can do a million different things at once.
You can’t text and drive. You can’t train while you’re writing. I can barely read while when their’s a TV show on in the backgroun.
I’m not a good multi-tasker.
Instead, do one thing for several hours in a row. I focus deeply — all of my energy on this one thing while I am doing it.
3 hours of writing in the morning. 30 minutes or so to get myself ready for training so that I have a plan when I walk into the gym. 2-2.5 hours of training.
After this, I’m tired. The hardest part of my day is over by 2pm.
Afternoons are for resting, some light editing, networking, reading, doing media, and lifting weights. Evenings are pretty sacred around our house, they’re for cooking, quality time, dog walking, watching mindless television (Scrubs right now!), and most importantly for performance, resting.
Furthermore, every period of my life has one key focus at a time.
Before ADCC, although I was doing many things, the focus was ADCC. Before PGF, the same. Before the book launch, it was 4 weeks of the main focus being bookwork and marketing.
Now that the book launch is over, I’m getting ready to compete again in a few weeks.
I’m still doing everything that needs to be done, but there are seasons. There is a magnum opus to each period of my life.
Closing Thoughts
The last few months have been insane.
Tons of crazy competition, lots of writing, traveling, marketing, publishing a book, doing seminars, releasing an instructional, getting injured, losing weight, traveling, and more.
It may, from the outside, seem like I am everywhere doing everything, all at once.
I’m not, however. The reality is that I’m just doing 2 things — to the max. Writing (and everything that writer has to do for their work) and professional Jiu-Jitsu and all that entails.
When I was younger, I couldn’t decide what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wanted to be everything… everywhere… all at once.
What I’ve learned as I’ve gotten older is that you actually can be everything — it just takes time.
I’m 27. There’s still time to do so much more. The dreams and goals that I have are constantly changing and evolving.
When I get to the end of my life, it will likely look like I had a clone, but in reality, I just developed the ability to hyper-focus on what matters most. I developed the ability to work on one thing at a time.
That is my secret.
My book — A Grappler’s Diary — is now available for purchase as an ebook and as a paperback.
I’m blown away by the support from everyone on this project so far. I hope you guys enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
If you like reading the newsletter, want to get better at Jiu-Jitsu, and want to learn more about my journey as a pro grappler, this is the book for you.
Hit this link to purchase a copy today.
The Grappler’s Diary is sponsored by BJJ Mental Models, the world’s #1 Jiu-Jitsu podcast!
This week we’re joined again by Eliot Marshall! Eliot is a BJJ black belt, retired UFC fighter, and owner of Easton Training Center in Colorado.
In this episode, Eliot explains the 4 elements that every successful Jiu-Jitsu gym needs to nail: sales, marketing, product, and culture.
To listen, look up BJJ Mental Models wherever you listen to your podcasts or just hit this link.
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