What Three Years on the BJJ Mat Have Taught Me Sometimes the skill that helps you survive one stage of life is the very skill you have to move beyond to reach the next. I joined Meraki Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu on October 2, 2023. By the time you’re reading this, I’ve been training there fairly consistently for just over three years. And I’ve learned something about myself I wasn’t expecting. I’ve gotten pretty good at surviving. Not winning. Not dominating. Not submitting everybody who gets in my...
about 23 hours ago • 11 min read
What Three Years on the BJJ Mat Have Taught Me Sometimes the skill that helps you survive one stage of life is the very skill you have to move beyond to reach the next. I joined Meraki Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu on October 2, 2023. By the time you’re reading this, I’ve been training there fairly consistently for just over three years. And I’ve learned something about myself I wasn’t expecting. I’ve gotten pretty good at surviving. Not winning. Not dominating. Not submitting everybody who gets in my...
about 11 hours ago • 11 min read
You Don’t Have to Be Right to Be a Strong Man Don't Sweat the Small Stuff and It's All Small Stuff by Richard Carlson Years ago I read a book called Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff… and It’s All Small Stuff, by Richard Carlson. Great book. Simple lessons. The kind of writing that makes you wonder why something so obvious wasn’t obvious to you before. Carlson died far too young. I wish he’d had more years to write, because he had a gift for taking something complicated about human behavior and...
about 22 hours ago • 10 min read
How I Used Dumb AI to Become a Smarter Voter After 43 years of voting, I finally felt like I understood every choice on my ballot. And I have an unreliable AI apprentice to thank for it. I’ve been voting since I was 18. That’s more than four decades of elections, candidates, propositions, judges, and political promises. And I’ll admit something. For most of those years, I didn’t feel nearly as informed as I wanted to be. I voted. I cared. I tried to do my homework. But there was always more...
2 days ago • 10 min read
Trust Yourself to Handle It There’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. How much of our lives do we spend trying to make sure nothing bad happens? We want our jobs to be secure. We want our relationships to be stable. We want enough money in the bank that an unexpected expense doesn’t ruin the month. We want the people around us to behave the way we expect, and we want tomorrow to look enough like today that we can make plans and feel safe. There’s nothing wrong with wanting...
3 days ago • 10 min read
How to Be a Badass Without Being a Bully For a good part of my life, I was a dick. Not because I wanted to hurt people. Not because I thought bullying was a good way to get things done. I was a dick because I was determined to be good at what I did, and I wasn’t going to let anybody get in my way. I wanted to be capable. I wanted to be reliable. I wanted to be the guy who could get things done. And I got pretty damn good at it. But somewhere along the way, I confused being responsible for my...
4 days ago • 9 min read
Becoming a Man Worth Trusting There’s a saying I often think about: It’s better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war. It's better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war. I like it because it names something I’ve spent most of my life working on. How do you become a man who can take care of himself and the people he loves, without turning every disagreement into a fight? How do you build strength without losing compassion? How do you get good at something without...
5 days ago • 13 min read
The Trust Equation:Knowing When to Protect Yourself and When to Open Up Some of the most important lessons we learn on the mat have an interesting analogy to knowing who and how to fight. One of those lessons is learning who we can trust. Think about the people in your life. There are people you feel completely comfortable around. You can speak freely, make mistakes, ask questions, and be yourself without worrying about what they’ll do with that vulnerability. Then there are people who...
6 days ago • 10 min read
I Retired From Construction.I Didn’t Retire From Building. In 2021, after a career working as a union electrician, I retired from construction. No more getting up because a contractor needed me on a jobsite. No more scheduling my life around construction projects. No more wondering how many more years I’d spend climbing ladders, pulling wire, and dealing with whatever problem showed up that day. I’d spent most of my adult life in the trade. And now I had the thing I’d been working toward for...
7 days ago • 12 min read
The People Around You Are Part of Your Wealth In 1986, I was twenty years old when I left Honolulu for Los Angeles. The beautiful playground in my backyard Honolulu was the world I’d grown up in. I had family, friends, and familiar places around me. Then I moved. And almost immediately, everything around me got bigger. Not the buildings or the freeways, though there were plenty of both. I mean the world of people. Suddenly I was surrounded by folks I’d never met, with different backgrounds,...
8 days ago • 9 min read