They Didn’t Tap Me Once Saturday.
Here’s Why.

Something interesting happened on the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu mat this past Saturday.

I rolled with somebody I hadn’t trained with in a little while. This person has been at Meraki for about four and a half or five years — roughly a two-year head start on me.

And when we used to roll, they destroyed me. Three submissions. Four. Sometimes five in a single five-minute round.

Tap, tap, tap, tap.

I don’t mean they were cruel. They weren’t. They were just better — they knew what they were doing, they were working their game, and I was doing my best to survive.

Eventually our schedules stopped lining up, and we didn’t run into each other at classes anymore.

Until Saturday.

We rolled. Five minutes. And something happened that surprised me.

They didn’t tap me once.

Now, don’t get the wrong idea. I wasn’t dominating the round.

I think I attempted one or two attacks the entire five minutes.

And I’m absolutely not a better grappler than this person across the board.

But something had changed.

I was much harder to submit. My frames were better, my grips were better, my base was stronger. I wasn’t falling over so easily, wasn’t giving away positions and opportunities the way I used to. I was making them work hard for every inch.

I had learned to create friction — and that friction made it much harder for my training partner to do what they wanted.

That was a genuine win. But it also got me thinking about the other side of friction.

Friction Works Both Ways

In jiu-jitsu, creating friction for your opponent is good strategy.

You use frames, grips, angles, and positioning to interrupt what they want to do, take away their easy openings, force them to fight for every movement.

But in the rest of life, the friction is often aimed at us.

We’re trying to accomplish something that matters:

• Build a business
• Improve our health
• Learn a skill
• Strengthen a relationship

Make progress on a goal we actually care about.

We work hard. We put in the hours. We try to stay disciplined.

And we’re not getting anywhere.

What do we tell ourselves?

Maybe.

But what if effort isn’t the actual problem?

What if we’re fighting friction we haven’t even identified?

Without Clarity, Effort Gets Wasted

About a year ago, Professor Alex Reis gave me one of the best pieces of advice I’ve heard on the mat. I’m paraphrasing, but the lesson was simple.

I was passing that advice along to another white belt just this Saturday.

Because when you’re a beginner, everything feels like a problem. Your guard gets passed. You lose your balance. Somebody controls your head. Your arm gets trapped. You get submitted. Again, and again, and again.

You could spend the next six months trying to learn fifty different techniques. Or you could slow down and ask one question:

What’s the one thing that keeps getting me into trouble?

Maybe you’re always losing your base. Maybe you’re extending your arms when you shouldn’t. Maybe you’re turning away and exposing your back.

Once you can name the specific problem, you have something useful to work on.

That’s clarity — and clarity changes how you practice.

Instead of trying to improve everything at once, you focus on improving one thing.

You notice when it happens.

You experiment.

You get feedback.

You try again.

And over time, that one fix tends to make several other problems easier.

That’s part of what happened on Saturday. I’m still a blue belt with real weaknesses.

But my defense improved enough that someone who used to submit me repeatedly had a much harder time.

And here’s the part worth underlining: I didn’t need fifty new attacks to make that progress. I needed to become harder to attack.

The Book, the Bottleneck, and the Factory

That advice from Professor Reis points at something deeper, and it reminds me of a book that has stayed with me: The Goal, by Eliyahu Goldratt and Jeff Cox.​

The Goal is technically a business novel about a struggling factory, but don’t let that scare you off. The story is this: a plant manager is told his factory will be shut down unless he turns it around in a matter of months.

So what does everybody instinctively do? Work harder. Run the machines longer. Push every department to be more efficient.

And the factory keeps losing money anyway.

The breakthrough comes when he learns to ask a different question. Instead of “how do we make everything faster,” it becomes “what’s the one thing actually limiting our output?”

The book calls it the constraint.

The bottleneck.

In a factory, the whole operation can be limited by a single bottleneck.

And the counterintuitive lesson is that pushing all the other departments harder doesn’t necessarily increase what gets shipped. It can just pile up more work behind the slow spot.

The smarter move is to find the current bottleneck, focus on it, and make more room there.

Then check whether the whole system actually improves. Once that constraint changes, you look again. The next limit may be somewhere else.

Now, I want to be careful not to overstate what happened on the mat.

Saturday wasn’t some clean case of me consciously locating one unique bottleneck and surgically removing it.

BJJ improvement doesn’t usually work that neatly.

A lot of small things — better frames, better grips, a stronger base, fewer easy openings — all added up together.

The Goal is a useful way to see the pattern. It’s not a perfect map of how my defense actually got better.

But it’s the same idea Professor Reis was pointing at: stop trying to improve everything at once, and start asking where the real problem lives.

I Caught Myself Working Without a Clear Target

I’ve been thinking about this a lot while building my business, because I can see the same pattern in myself.

I want to train BJJ. I want to publish a daily newsletter. I want to build The Leader’s Dojo. I want to live a happy, meaningful life.

Those are real.

They matter to me.

But here’s the thing I’ve had to admit: most of them aren’t goals in the practical sense.

They’re dreams and aspirations — directions — and a happy life especially was never meant to be reduced to a number.

But directions don’t tell me what measurable progress looks like this week. “Train more” isn’t a target. “Grow the business” isn’t a target.

I’ve been learning to separate the two.

The destination I care about and the dream driving it stay big and human.

But below that dream, I still need to get concrete: the immediate outcome I’m after, the obstacle actually in the way, the next action, and the evidence the action worked.

Without that, I fumble. I tweak the website, fiddle with the newsletter, poke at business development, drift around the mat. Busy everywhere. And none of it clearly moving anything.

The dream gives me the direction. The operating goal gives me the next step. I used to confuse them, and that’s where the fumbling came from.

Sometimes the Problem Isn’t You. It’s the System.

This is where the business lesson and the mat lesson meet.

I’ve spent years learning, planning, building systems, and trying to make everything fit together. A lot of hours. A lot of effort. And sometimes, despite all of it, I’ve felt like I’m standing still.

My instinct was always to do more. Another plan. Another tool. Another system. Another strategy.

Lately I’ve started asking a different question instead.

Am I making progress harder than it needs to be?

Because sometimes the very systems we build to help us become another source of friction.

Too many choices. Too many projects. Too many priorities vying for attention.

And when everything feels important, it’s hard to know what deserves your focus right now.

Without that clarity, you can work a full day and still feel like you’re running in place.

Not because you’re lazy, and not because you lack discipline — but because you never clearly identified the actual constraint.

It’s like being trapped under somebody in jiu-jitsu and trying every movement you can think of. Push here. Turn there. Bridge. Shrimp. Grab something. Try harder.

You can burn every bit of your energy without making any space.

Sometimes the smarter move is to recognize exactly what’s preventing you from moving — and deal with that first.

Make Progress Easier. Make Distractions Harder.

Once you know where the constraint is, friction becomes a tool you can aim.

Alex Hormozi has described working in a room with few visual distractions, using earplugs and headphones, blocking notifications, keeping his phone away, and setting a timer.

It’s an extreme version of a simple idea: make it easier to focus and harder to wander off.

What struck me wasn’t just his discipline. It was how much thought went into the setup.

He was removing friction from the behavior he wanted, and adding friction to the behavior he didn’t.

On the mat, I use frames and grips to make it harder for my opponent to submit me.

In his office, Hormozi uses his environment to make it harder for distractions to interrupt him.

Different situations. Same underlying principle.

Make the things that matter easier to do. Make the things that interfere harder to do.

And no, not all friction is bad.

Training wouldn’t teach us much if nobody ever resisted us. Some resistance genuinely makes us stronger — that’s the productive kind.

But there’s a difference between productive resistance that helps you grow and unnecessary resistance that just keeps you stuck.

And usually you can’t tell the two apart until you stop and actually look at what’s happening.

Which brings us back to clarity.

Clarity and Practice Feed Each Other

I think we get the sequence backward a lot of the time.

We decide we want something, then immediately ask how hard we’re willing to work for it.

But it isn’t really a clean before-and-after.

It’s a loop.

Get clear enough about what you’re after. Identify the friction that’s slowing you down. Practice. Watch what actually happens. Adjust.

Then repeat.

Clarity isn’t a thing you achieve once and then finally get to start working.

It sharpens through the work.

You take a swing, watch the result, and the next question gets better.

Because discipline is valuable. Effort is valuable. Persistence is valuable. But none of them guarantees you’re working on the right problem.

You can be incredibly disciplined about doing something that isn’t moving you toward your goal at all.

And the more effort you pour into the wrong approach, the more frustrated and stuck you feel.

Sometimes the answer really is to work harder. Sometimes it’s to learn a new skill. And sometimes it’s to remove the single obstacle that’s been making everything else unnecessarily hard.

The trick is staying loose enough to figure out which one it is.

The Lesson From Saturday

I walked away from that five-minute round feeling pretty good.

Not because I won some imaginary championship. Not because I’d become a better martial artist than my training partner.

But because I could see actual evidence that something I’d been practicing was working.

My defense had improved. My frames and base were doing their job. And for once, I wasn’t spending the whole round tapping.

That’s progress — and it reminded me that progress often becomes visible when we stop trying to do everything at once and get better at the few things that matter most.

Clarity tells us where to look. Removing unnecessary friction makes the work easier. Consistent practice turns it into something we can measure.

⚔ The Dojo Drill: Find the Constraint

Think about one important thing you’ve been struggling to accomplish.

Ask yourself three questions.

1. Clarity — what exactly am I trying to accomplish?

2. The constraint — what’s the single biggest recurring obstacle making that difficult?

3. Action — what’s one thing I could remove, simplify, or change to make progress easier?

Don’t build an elaborate plan. Don’t try to fix ten things at once.

Choose one. Make one adjustment. Then pay attention to what happens.

Because the goal isn’t to work harder everywhere. It’s to find the bottleneck — and widen it.

📚 Leader’s Library

​The Art of Learning — Josh Waitzkin​

Why?

Josh Waitzkin knows something about learning difficult skills.

As a young chess prodigy whose early life helped inspire Searching for Bobby Fischer, he developed an unusually deep understanding of competitive chess.

Later, he turned his attention to martial arts, becoming a world champion in Tai Chi Push Hands competition.

In The Art of Learning, Waitzkin explores what these seemingly different disciplines taught him about developing expertise.

P.S. Know a martial arts gym owner who’s stressed about money or student numbers?

Do them a favor: send them to The Leader's Dōjō, my website where I help owners get more students and keep them longer with simple systems.

One forward from you could change their gym: The Leader's Dōjō​

Chuck