Halfway Through 2022: Reflections and Goals For the Next 6 Months

If you had told me in January.

Picture of the author being very happy in Poznan, Poland because he was eating bread for the first time in 3 weeks.

I don’t usually feel great about reminiscing over the past, but the past 6 months have been crazy.

At the beginning of this year, I’d never competed against a black belt in Jiu-Jitsu. My first match of the year was against a black belt, and one of my first 10 matches was against one of the top-ranked black belts in the world.

We didn’t really “ease” into this year. We got right to it.

After I missed and underperformed at some of the biggest tournaments in the world last fall, I felt really hungry to get out there and showcase my skills as much as possible this year.

I was also really motivated to get to a place where I could Jiu-Jitsu and blog full-time. At the beginning of the year, I was doing a lot of copywriting for clients of about 10 different businesses, in addition to training 2–3 times per day and writing daily on Medium and Quora.

Honestly, I figured that by doing these “non Jiu-Jitsu” gigs I was decreasing the quality of my training and that I was going to struggle in competition until I made the jump into full-time training.

In the end, that didn’t happen.

In the end, I ended up doing pretty well in Jiu-Jitsu in the first half of the year.

I took 4th at the ADCC West Coast Trials, made the top 8 in the European Trials, and I beat an ADCC veteran to win a $5000 tournament in Minnesota.

I also got my black belt, got to teach a few seminars, and got to go travel to a bunch of cool places to train, including London, San Diego, and Austin. I also went and traveled to Italy for a week and ate bread until my face was shaped like an oval.

One of the many pizzas I had in Italy.

It’s only halfway through the year and I’ve already been on 12 trips for Jiu-Jitsu this year.

I also quit copywriting.