Why You Shouldn’t Give Up
Uncovering the myth of “hard work”.
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This year has been extremely challenging.
I started off the year feeling a bit aimless with my life and where I was going. I wrote an article in early January about how I was having “a quarter-life crisis”. Every post I write is honest, and that one was no different.
Since then, for a while at least, life did not “get better”. I was losing matches, my writing business was fading, and I was constantly battling random injuries throughout the spring — knee, hamstring, and back, to name a few.
But lately, although it’s not perfect, things have been looking up (this is the part where you should knock on some wood for me).
I’m competing frequently and fairly well, my writing has been growing and improving, and I’ve been working hard on the side on some new projects. I recently got ranked in the top 15 in the world in my weight class (for the second time, after I dropped from the rankings this spring), and I have plenty more big matches coming up over the next few months.
I’ve been very active in everything I’m doing and I’m doing a lot to reinvent myself.
Here are a few key ideas that I believe have helped me reinvent myself over the last few months:
Volume matters a lot.
I touched on this today in my Grappler’s Diary Instagram post, but I’m going to touch on it again here.
The volume of work that you put into a given craft is a key determinant of your success in that craft.
There’s a reason that people live in laundromats and sleep on mats so that they can train and compete in Jiu-Jitsu full-time. There’s a reason that digital writers like Nicolas Cole, Tim Denning, and Jessica Wildfire post an insane amount of content. There’s a reason why young musicians spend hours with their instruments practicing boring things like scales and simple tunes.
While “working smart” is great, a smart worker realizes that hard work (and a lot of it) is imperative to success.
These last few months, my work volume has been more intense than it was in months prior.
