"I’m Not Gonna Get Any Work Out of That Guy Today..." I was a third-year apprentice working downtown Los Angeles. The Roybal Federal Courthouse building My foreman was Bill Rae. Bill was one of those people I paid attention to because I was still learning not only how to do electrical work, but how experienced people handled other people. Another guy on the job was Jim DeYoung. Jim was not somebody I thought of as weak or incapable. Quite the opposite. One of the images that has stuck with me...
about 3 hours ago • 9 min read
The Circuit Was Supposed to Be Dead I hate graveyard shift. I didn’t grow up around factories that run day and night. I never had to work “third shift” as a regular thing. But sometimes in construction, there are projects that can only happen in the middle of the night. Hospitals. Airports. Critical systems that can’t simply be shut down while people are using them. Defense contractors would sometimes take advantage of the annual two-week holiday period at the end of the year to do...
1 day ago • 10 min read
Working ON Your Life and Working IN Your Life I tapped somebody with a lapel choke recently. BJJ crucifix claw choke From the outside, it probably didn’t look like much. People tap each other every day in a BJJ gym. That’s the game. Blue belts submit blue belts all the time. For me, though, the tap wasn’t the important part. The important part was where the choke came from. I had learned it that day in that class. Then I recognized it while somebody was actively trying to stop me. That’s...
2 days ago • 8 min read
You’re Assuming They’re Playing Your Game For most of my working life, I made an assumption that caused me a lot more frustration than I realized. I assumed the other guys wanted what I wanted. I spent thirty-five years as a union electrician. When I went to work, I wanted to do good work. Not merely work that passed inspection. Not merely work that was good enough that nobody yelled at us. I took pride in the work. I wanted the installation to be effective, efficient, professional. When...
4 days ago • 8 min read
The Knee Tweak That Answered a Year-Old Question A couple of weeks ago I was rolling with a new kid at the gym. Nice kid. Big kid. Probably around 200 pounds, which, considering me, makes this exactly the sort of decision that gets some of my friends to look at me like I’ve lost my mind. What I liked about him immediately was that he wasn’t spazzy. That matters. We ended up with me playing closed guard, and instead of thrashing around, trying to explode out, stacking me, or doing the usual...
5 days ago • 10 min read
Who’s Going to Stop You? They can close a door. They can’t decide who you become. There’s a question I think we ask far too often: Who’s going to let me? Who’s going to give me permission? Who’s going to give me the opportunity? Who’s going to invite me into the room? Who’s going to recognize that I’m ready? Who’s going to finally decide that I deserve a chance? Maybe that’s the wrong question. Maybe the better question is: Who’s going to stop you? That doesn’t mean the world is fair. It...
6 days ago • 10 min read
The Black-Belt Fallacy GM Han with some of his new 2nd dan instructors I already had a black belt when I became a white belt again. I had spent decades in martial arts. I had earned a second-degree black belt in Hapkido. Then I walked into Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. I tied on a white belt. And the white belt was right. That matters. I was not starting from zero. I knew how to train. I knew how to listen. I knew how to take a correction. I understood timing. Leverage. Movement. Pressure. But I did...
7 days ago • 8 min read
The Fair-Weather Rider It happens almost every nice weekend in Los Angeles, especially during the summer. The weather gets beautiful and suddenly there are motorcycles everywhere. And I can tell that some of these guys do not ride very often. The funny part is that I cannot always point to one specific thing and say, “That is how I know.” It is more like something I learned in Hapkido. GM Han, back in the day, doing a high side kick After enough years training, sometimes I knew a guy was...
8 days ago • 9 min read
The Teacher Was Already There Some of my favorite books seem to change every time I reread them. They don’t. I do. I have been a lifelong reader, and I have had this experience more times than I can count. I will pick up a book I read ten or twenty years ago and suddenly find a sentence that stops me. Something I barely noticed the first time now feels like it was written directly to me. A passage I once skimmed now contains an entire lesson I was not ready to absorb. Zen in the Martial Arts...
9 days ago • 8 min read