What the Pursuit of Happiness Really Looks Like
The internet makes us lie to each other and ourselves.
About 10 years ago, I first walked into a Jiu-Jitsu academy.
At the time, I was 17, I had just finished my mediocre high school wrestling career, and I didn’t know what was going to happen next. I was trying to embrace unpredictability (there was something freeing about not having to tie my identity to wrestling anymore), but the truth is that I was scared shitless.
If you had told me back then that I’d end up where I am now, I’d probably have laughed you out of the room. If you had told me that I’d get to do all this and that I’d still feel unhappy sometimes, I’d have really upset with you and me.
Nowadays, I get to travel the world, write articles about whatever I’m thinking about, compete at the highest level of Jiu-Jitsu, and I even have a leg lock named after me. It feels like the obsession that I’ve put into Jiu-Jitsu for the last decade has paid off in a way.
But the obsession didn’t make me happy.
Here’s exactly how I became happier (even with anxiety) and how you can too.
First, get good at something.
It’s not really about being the best, but being better than other people certainly helps your career.
For me, all of my early 20s were completely focused on Jiu-Jitsu and writing. I spent time on little else. I was a workaholic — often hammering out 12-14 hour days. Even my leisure time was spent reading books and listening to podcasts to learn ways that could improve my online business, my Jiu-Jitsu skills, and myself.
Most of my time was spent on the mat working on training or teaching, in the gym working on moving heavy weights, or staring at half-completed articles like I am right now, struggling to find a way to make it all make sense.
In the short term, volume accelerates results. This is why training multiple Jiu-Jitsu sessions in a day is a good way to get ahead. This is also why I used to write sometimes up to 10 articles per week on Medium and also juggle client work.
In the beginning days of any endeavor, you need to grind.
I was doing whatever I could to reach that volume threshold that I thought would take me to the world-class level of my skills.
Along the way, however, something funny happened.
Inevitably, you will make an ass of yourself.
There’s really no way around it.
I can’t help but look back on my writing from 12 months ago and get annoyed. Rereading my early articles on Medium (like this one) makes my skin crawl.
But the making an ass of myself wasn’t just limited to writing and working. A fact about myself that I hate to share is that for almost 2 years as a brown belt, I had bleach blonde hair. I was also often a complete diva in the training room, doing everything I could to squeeze the absolute most out of my training partners so that I could win in my next competition. I threw hissy fits, got upset at myself, and made everything about me way more than I needed to.
I thought that winning everything, all the time, was the only way to keep my dream alive. The idea of “embracing the journey” did not exist for me.
The result was being high-strung, dealing with severe anxiety, putting so much pressure on myself that I’d completely break down, and then eventually wanting to quit everything altogether.
I made an ass of myself both in front of others and in private. I took myself and everything I did too seriously.
Then, you get empty.
Some people never get past the thrill of putting more pressure on themselves than they can handle.
I was not one of those people, thankfully. I tend to think I went too hard in my own personal pressure cooker, so that now, I just can’t anymore.
It comes and goes in waves, but typically, a period of intense pressure for me is followed by a complete sense of “not giving an F” anymore. I want to sit on a beach, drink pina coladas, and not think about anything that matters.
There’s often a myth that many people are as unhappy when they’re relaxing as they are when they’re in the trenches of creating their best work, but I’m not one of those people. I’m pretty fulfilled and happy doing both. One thing that I’m proud of is that I can turn my work brain down a notch when I am traveling or in the offseason.
I can turn it off because when I’m in my intense sprint, I give everything I have. I squeeze every last drop of focus, productivity, and grit out of myself to the point that I need a period to recharge.
After finishing my book, for example, I didn’t have the energy to write well for months on end. Only recently have I begun to rediscover my love for writing. Only recently has writing started to feel “normal” again.
So my closing advice for this section is this:
Give it your all, and then take a break.
Take a page out of Nietzsche’s playbook and work like a lion, not a cow.
Closing Thoughts
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but most Instagram captions are rarely more than a paragraph.
When you go online, it seems like everyone is living their best life, all the time.
If you want to reach your goals, live a more romantic life, and have more control over what you do, you need to embrace the idea that you are constantly going to have ups and downs. There will be wins, losses, triumphs, failures, boredom, and moments of complete unpredictability.
Social media and the internet are scary because they are highly addictive and train us to believe that all that matters is the high of reaching an end goal. The idea that the process is less important than the result.
But the high of winning only lasts a moment. A few days tops. The low of a devastating loss lasts about the same.
Time heals all wounds.
The pursuit of happiness is more about what you do on a daily basis than it is about what happens to you.
What you might not realize is that the pursuit of success is the same.
The Grappler’s Diary is sponsored by BJJ Mental Models, the world’s #1 Jiu-Jitsu podcast!
This week we’re joined again by Charles Harriott!
In this episode, Charles discusses the problem of “gatekeepers” in Jiu-Jitsu, or people who try to enforce their way of thinking over others.
Charles explores how gatekeeping can shut down creativity, personal development, and fun.
To listen, look up BJJ Mental Models wherever you listen to your podcasts or just hit this link.
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Beautiful. Resonates with me deeply.
We all want quality output but forget quality is derived from initial quantity of less than quality output.