Don’t Be Equal: Learn to Fight Your Fight

So don’t be equal.

That’s a lesson I’ve understood intellectually for decades. Brazilian jiu-jitsu keeps finding new ways to beat it into me.

Literally.

Last Saturday I was training with a blue belt, Hudson, a six-foot-four, 230 pounds, and thirty years old young man.

I’m five-foot-two, about 120 pounds, and pushing sixty.

Do the math.

It reminded me of being a kid on the playground when everybody was picking teams. The other players got picked first.

And the biggest kid and the smallest kid were the last two standing, so we’d look at each other and figure, well, I guess we’re partners.

Except now I’m over sixty, paying good money for the privilege, and voluntarily rolling around on the floor with a guy who outweighs me by more than a hundred pounds.

What the hell am I thinking?

Then Wednesday, it happened again.

Another blue belt. This guy was only six-foot-two.

Only.

But he weighed about 240 pounds. He’d recently joined our school after training somewhere else.

Really nice guy.

But damn.

Big fucking dudes.

And here’s the thing.

Both of them were good training partners, being really careful not to smash me.

But neither of them needs to be mean, aggressive, or particularly skilled to make my life miserable. They have gravity working for them. Longer limbs. More mass. More leverage in the positions that matter.

When one of those guys gets on top, I don’t need a physics textbook to understand the relationship between mass and pressure. I get a firsthand demonstration.

And if I try to meet them strength for strength, pressure for pressure, muscle for muscle?

I’m an idiot.

I’m playing their game.

And it’s a game I’m probably going to lose.

The Problem With Fighting Fair

We grow up taught to play fair. Same rules. Same opportunities. Same expectations.

And there’s value in that.

But somewhere along the way, we start confusing fairness with equality of capability. We think that because two people are playing the same game, they should approach it the same way.

That’s nonsense.

A six-foot-four, 230-pound athlete and a five-foot-two, 120-pound man over the age of sixty do not have the same physical advantages. Pretending otherwise doesn’t make me courageous.

It makes me stupid.

Of course, BJJ is supposed to be the art that helps a smaller person overcome a bigger opponent. And it can.

But here’s what gets lost in that marketing message.

Technique doesn’t magically erase physics.

Technique helps you use physics more intelligently.

If the big guy has comparable skill and a substantial physical advantage, that’s a hard problem. And as a blue belt, I don’t have such an overwhelming technical edge that I can casually dismiss a hundred-pound weight difference.

So what do I do?

I have to stop trying to be equal.

Don’t Fight Their Fight

When I was younger, I spent years studying Hapkido under Grandmaster Bong Soo Han.

And one of the beautiful things about studying martial arts is recognizing a principle that shows up everywhere.

Don’t meet force with force when you don’t have to.

• Redirect
• Change the angle
• Break the balance
• Use timing instead of muscle
• Make the other person’s advantage less useful

Easy to say.

Much harder when a 240-pound blue belt is trying to flatten you.

Because under pressure, our natural tendency is to fight harder. Push harder. Squeeze harder. Use more strength.

But what if more strength is exactly the wrong answer?

What if the answer is to change the problem?

If someone is stronger than you, don’t make strength the deciding factor.

If someone is heavier, don’t voluntarily accept a contest of pressure.

If someone has longer reach, don’t insist on fighting at the distance that favors them.

That doesn’t guarantee you’ll win. It gives you a better problem to solve.

Instead of asking, “How do I beat this guy at what he’s good at?” I need to ask:

“What can I do that makes his advantages less relevant?”

That’s a completely different question.

And the questions we ask determine the problems we try to solve.

Being Tough Isn’t Enough

Here’s something else I’ve discovered after three years of BJJ.

I’ve gotten pretty good at surviving.

A bigger guy gets on top of me and I know how to frame, breathe, protect my neck, defend my arms, and avoid getting submitted immediately.

That’s progress.

But surviving isn’t the same as improving my position.

If all I ever do is defend, I’m becoming harder to beat without necessarily becoming better at winning.

Against bigger opponents, that distinction matters.

I need to learn to escape, change angles, recover position, and create opportunities instead of simply enduring their pressure.

Because if my entire strategy is to survive somebody else’s game, I’ve already surrendered too much control.

What Does It Mean to Be Antifragile?

This week we’ve been exploring ideas from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Antifragile.

Taleb distinguishes between things that break under stress, things that resist stress, and things that can actually benefit from stress.

Fragile things are damaged by disorder.

Robust things withstand it.

Antifragile things can improve because of certain kinds of stress and variation.

There’s a useful lesson for martial arts in that.

If I spend my whole life rolling with people my own size, strength, and ability, I might get very comfortable.

I might even start thinking I’m pretty good.

Then I roll with a six-foot-four, 230-pound athlete, and suddenly all my comfortable assumptions get tested.

Techniques that worked beautifully against a smaller training partner don’t work nearly as well.

Positions that felt safe become dangerous.

Grips that seemed strong become useless.

And I find weaknesses I didn’t know I had.

That experience by itself doesn’t make me antifragile.

Getting smashed isn’t automatically growth. Sometimes getting smashed just means getting smashed.

The opportunity comes afterward.

When I ask what happened.

What failed, and why?

Was it timing, position, an over-reliance on strength?

Did I accept a position I never should have accepted?

And most importantly:

What am I going to do differently next time?

That’s where improvement begins.

Stress gives me feedback.

Reflection helps me interpret it.

Practice turns the feedback into new capability.

And the next time I face a bigger opponent, I have a chance to be better prepared.

Not because I’ve gotten bigger.

Because I’ve gotten smarter.

Stop Competing on Someone Else’s Terms

Here’s where the lesson applies well beyond martial arts.

We do this in everyday life all the time.

We look at somebody else and see what they’re good at.

More money.

Better connections.

Younger, stronger, taller, better-looking, more charismatic, more naturally talented.

And we decide the answer is to become more like them.

We compete on their terms. We enter their game, accept their rules, and then wonder why we’re struggling.

But what if we’re asking the wrong question?

What if the goal isn’t to become equal?

What if it’s to become distinctly capable?

A small business doesn’t beat a huge corporation by becoming a smaller version of it. It might win by being more personal, more responsive, more specialized, more adaptable.

A quiet person doesn’t become a better leader by outtalking the loudest person in the room. They might lead better by listening, asking better questions, and noticing what everybody else misses.

And a sixty-year-old martial artist doesn’t beat a younger, stronger opponent by pretending he’s still thirty.

He has to understand what he has, what he doesn’t, and how to use both intelligently.

That’s not an excuse to avoid developing weaknesses.

It’s a reason to stop mistaking somebody else’s strengths for the only strengths worth having.

Know Your Fight

One of the things I’ve come to appreciate about getting older is that I’m less interested in proving myself.

I don’t have to prove I’m stronger than a thirty-year-old.

I’m not.

I don’t have to prove I can overpower a man who outweighs me by a hundred pounds.

I probably can’t.

But I can improve my timing.

I can sharpen my technique.

I can learn to move more efficiently.

I can recognize the positions that disadvantage me and stop voluntarily walking into them.

I can ask better questions of my instructors.

I can learn from every roll.

And I can keep showing up.

Not to prove I’m equal.

To get better at the fight that’s actually mine.

That’s what I want to carry away from these rounds with the big guys.

Not that I survived.

Not that I proved how tough I am.

But that the experience exposed something I need to learn.

And now I have a clearer direction for my training.

⚔ The Dojo Drill: Change the Game

Think about something in your life right now where you feel outmatched.

More experience. More resources. More natural ability. More time. More advantages.

Ask yourself three questions.

1. Whose game am I playing?

Am I trying to compete using the exact qualities that give someone else the edge?

2. What capabilities do I have that I’m underusing?

What could I do differently, rather than just trying harder?

3. What is this difficulty teaching me?

What weakness has it exposed, and what can I practice to address it?

Don’t confuse enduring difficulty with benefiting from it.

The goal isn’t to become somebody who can take more punishment.

It’s to become somebody who learns to solve better problems.

Because all things being equal, the bigger, stronger, faster guy will probably win.

So don’t be equal.

Find your fight.

Learn your advantages.

And get better at using them.

📚 From the Leader’s Library

​Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder — Nassim Nicholas Taleb​

Why?

Most people try to build a life that can withstand adversity, but Taleb challenges us to go further: build a life that actually grows stronger through challenges, uncertainty, and change.

Antifragile explores how creating options, reducing unnecessary dependencies, and learning from manageable setbacks can help us thrive rather than merely survive. It’s a powerful reminder that personal leadership isn’t about controlling everything life throws at us—it’s about becoming more capable, adaptable, and prepared for whatever comes next.