You Don’t Rise to the Occasion.You Fall to Your Training. On September 21, 2005, JetBlue Flight 292 took off from Burbank, California, headed for New York. Shortly after takeoff, the crew discovered they had a problem. The nose landing gear was stuck sideways. Not slightly crooked. The wheels were turned roughly ninety degrees. They could not just continue across the country and hope everything worked itself out. So the plane stayed in the air, burning fuel and preparing for an emergency...
about 3 hours ago • 9 min read
Competence Is Quiet I think somewhere along the way I grew up wanting to be a ninja. Not literally. Well, maybe a little literally. I grew up in the seventies and eighties, when ninjas were everywhere—movies, books, martial arts magazines, and probably the imagination of every kid who thought disappearing into the shadows wearing black was the coolest thing imaginable. The Ninja by Eric Van Lustbader I remember reading Eric Van Lustbader’s The Ninja. That book opened a door for me. Through...
1 day ago • 8 min read
Character Is More Important Than Which Side You’re On I have been fortunate to spend most of my life around people who were different from me. Really different. I grew up in Honolulu, what people sometimes call the Melting Pot of the Pacific. Japanese. Chinese. Filipino. Korean. Samoan. Tongan. Hawaiian. Portuguese. And every mixture of those you can imagine. Then I moved to Los Angeles and discovered that I did not understand diversity at all. Growing up in Hawaii, white people were...
2 days ago • 9 min read
The Facts You Don’t Like Still Count One of the things I love most about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is that the mat has a strange ability to give you humility and confidence at exactly the same time. You learn what you can do. And you learn very quickly what you cannot do. The mat does not particularly care about the story you tell yourself. Last week I was rolling with Wesley. Wes is this really cool California surfer dude, almost Lebowski-ish. Big guy. Brown belt. Badass at BJJ. But he also has...
3 days ago • 7 min read
The Warrior Who Can’t Become a Scout Will Eventually Fight the Wrong Battle I remember reading an idea years ago that stuck with me. I think it may have been in a Tony Robbins book, although I cannot remember well enough to swear to the source. The idea was that people tend to bring their profession home with them. The lawyer litigates with his wife. The doctor goes to a party and starts diagnosing everybody. The therapist does therapy on friends who never asked to become clients. I spent...
4 days ago • 9 min read
Not Every Good Person Is a Good Training Partner There's a scene from the movie, The Matrix Reloaded, that I love, it's where Seraph fights Neo to make sure he's not an imposter. And it highlights today's article. Recently I made a decision on the BJJ mat that I did not particularly enjoy making. I decided not to roll with somebody anymore. Not because I dislike him. Actually, I like him. He is a nice guy. We talk all the time. We are both blue belts. We have both been at the school for...
5 days ago • 9 min read
The Story I Told Myself Was That I Was in Control For years, Amy tried to explain something to me that I understood intellectually but did not really understand. She would talk about the unconscious. The subconscious. The emotional body. The somatic body. The ways our bodies and emotions can respond before the analytical mind catches up. I understood the words. I understood the concepts. They made sense to me. And they did not make sense to me. Because I had another source of evidence. Me. I...
6 days ago • 7 min read
The World Is Too Complex for Easy Certainty I was talking recently with "Michael", a new bar-exam finisher, soon-to-be esquire, when he said something that changed the way I think about uncertainty. Michael also coaches people preparing for the LSAT. We were talking about how students judge their own performance, and he told me that one mistake students sometimes make is feeling too confident about how well they did. That sounded strange to me. Isn’t confidence what you want? If you know the...
7 days ago • 8 min read
Every Story Has a Point of View.So Do You. When my partner in Tokyo and I first started trying to build a business helping martial-arts schools, I thought we had one enormous advantage. We were martial artists. Not tourists. Not generic business consultants who had never bowed onto a mat. We had spent years, decades even, inside dojos. We knew what good instruction felt like. We knew what bad instruction felt like. We knew what it was like to walk into a school and feel welcomed, and we knew...
8 days ago • 8 min read
The Most Dangerous Word in Culture Is “Normal” comparing knives at a house party In 1986, not long after I moved from Hawaii to Los Angeles, I ended up at a house party. I don’t remember whose party it was anymore. I don’t even remember why I was there or who invited me. But I remember the kitchen. I had been wandering through the house, getting my bearings, when I came across a small group of young guys standing around showing one another the knives they carried. Fixed blades. Folding...
9 days ago • 8 min read