This Is Why You Don’t Get Better

It has very little to do with how hard you work.

Chris Wojcik
4 min readDec 5, 2023
Photo via Sammy P Photography

Whether you’re trying to get better at Jiu-Jitsu, playing the flute, or flipping burgers, the biggest obstacle that you have to get past to make progress in different skills is yourself.

Yes — there are other obstacles in the way of your progress, but obstacles aren’t usually as important as the internal ones. They’re not important because you can’t control them.

Sometimes, in Jiu-Jitsu, you have an opponent who’s on steroids. Sometimes the referee is bad. Sometimes you get a bad restart. Sometimes this, sometimes that. There are sometimes variables that you can’t control. This is part of the game.

But are those things really worth stressing out about?

I tend to think it’s better to focus on yourself and your own development.

But still, sometimes people get in their own way.

Here are a few of the main reasons why most people struggle to make progress toward their goals.

You don’t trust anyone.

If your goal is to improve a skill, you probably need a coach.

In my experience, you need to reach an extremely high level to improve without a coach or a guide, and even then…

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