I Write About Kicking Ass.
Lately, I’m Getting Mine Kicked.

I write a lot about doing hard things.

Discipline.

Leadership.

Getting back up.

Training when you do not feel like training.

Taking responsibility.

Not making excuses.

Kicking ass.

So I probably need to tell you something.

Lately, I have been getting my ass kicked.

Not physically.

At least, not any more than usual at Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

I mean in business.

I have been trying to build The Leader’s Dojo, a business helping martial arts school owners improve the way they get and keep students.

And there have been mornings recently when I have looked at what I am trying to build and thought:

Who the fuck do I think I am?

That is not great marketing copy.

But it is true.

The Part You Usually Don’t See

There is a version of entrepreneurship that makes for good social media.

You have a vision.

You make the decision.

You take massive action.

You overcome adversity.

Eventually the montage music starts playing and everybody sees that you believed in yourself all along.

That has not been my experience.

My experience has included a lot of:

• What am I doing?
• Why isn’t this working?
• Am I solving a problem anybody actually wants me to solve?
• Am I talking to the right people?
• Is my offer wrong?
• Is my outreach bad?
• Am I overthinking this?
• Am I underthinking it?
• Do I need more conversations?
• Do I need a better system?

Am I building the system because I need it…

…or because building systems is more comfortable than hearing “no”?

That last question stings.

Because I know myself well enough to know that I can turn learning into avoidance.

I can turn preparation into avoidance.

I can turn research into avoidance.

Hell, I can turn being incredibly productive into avoidance.

You can work your ass off all day and still avoid the one thing that scares you.

The Crickets Have Been Loud

A lot of my early outreach produced almost nothing.

Emails went unanswered.

Loom videos went unwatched.

Warm conversations stalled.

A sales conversation that I thought might go somewhere went sideways.

At one point, I went far too long without doing consistent outreach at all.

And that bothered me more than I expected.

Because work is part of my identity.

For 35 years as an electrician, you showed up.

You worked.

You solved problems.

You produced something real.

There were certainly politics, bullshit, delays, and bad management.

But at the end of a shift, conduit was installed.

Wire was pulled.

Equipment was powered.

Something existed that had not existed that morning.

Entrepreneurship is different.

You can spend a month working and still have very little external evidence that anybody gives a shit.

That has been difficult for me.

Then I Looked at the Competition

A few days ago, I started researching companies that already serve martial arts gyms.

And that did not initially make me feel better.

It made me feel worse.

Some of these companies have been doing this for years.

Some have entire teams.

Thousands of customers.

Software platforms.

Established marketing systems.

Case studies.

Sales teams.

Coaching programs.

Beautiful websites.

Clear positioning.

And here’s me.

A 61-year-old retired electrician who loves martial arts, is still a blue belt in BJJ, has worked with a handful of gym owners, and is trying to figure out whether I can actually become useful enough at this to deserve their money.

I looked at all of that and had a pretty ugly thought:

Why would anybody hire me?

That was my Valley of Despair.

Maybe I am still in it.

The Valley of Despair

If you have seen one of those learning curves, you probably know the shape.

At the beginning, ignorance feels pretty good.

You do not know enough to see everything that could go wrong.

The idea is exciting.

The possibilities are obvious.

Then you learn.

And learn.

And learn some more.

Eventually you know enough to realize:

Oh shit. This is a lot harder than I thought.

Your confidence drops faster than your actual ability rises.

That is the Valley of Despair.​

I have written about this stuff.

I have coached people through versions of it.

I understand it intellectually.

Turns out that does not give me a VIP pass around it.

Knowing the map does not mean you get to skip walking through the territory.

Comparison Can Be Useful—or Poison

I watched an Alex Hormozi video recently where he talked about the pain of learning business.

One idea hit me hard.

There is nothing inherently wrong with noticing that somebody else is better than you.

The problem is what you do with the comparison.

I can look at somebody with a stronger business and say:

“They are better at this than I am.”

That may simply be true.

Then I have a choice.

I can turn that observation into an identity judgment:

“They are better at this, therefore I suck.”

Or I can turn it into a question:

What are they doing that I don’t know how to do yet?

Those are radically different responses to the same evidence.

One destroys agency.

The other creates a curriculum.

I am trying to choose the second one.

I’m a White Belt Again

Martial arts should have prepared me for this.

I walked into BJJ after years of Hapkido.

I already had a black belt.

Hell, I had two of them!

I knew how to train.

I knew how to learn.

I knew how to be disciplined.

And then people started choking me.

My previous competence did not disappear.

It just did not automatically transfer.

There is something humbling about being very good in one environment and mediocre, or even sucking hard, in another.

Business has been doing the same thing to me.

I know leadership.

I know construction.

I know how to organize complicated work.

I know how to see dependencies and handoffs.

I know how to teach.

I know martial arts culture.

None of that automatically makes me good at finding clients.

Or selling.

Or positioning an offer.

Or pricing.

Or knowing what a martial arts owner will actually pay to fix.

Those are different skills.

I’m a white belt again.

And white belts get tapped.

A lot.

I Have Also Created Some of My Own Problems

It would be convenient to make this story entirely about how hard entrepreneurship is.

That would let me off too easily.

Some of the punches have been self-inflicted.

I like systems.

So I built systems.

Then I automated some of them before I had earned the right to automate them.

My CRM became more complicated than it needed to be.

Old outreach and new outreach got tangled.

Processes that were supposed to make work easier sometimes created more work.

At one point I had to admit something I do not particularly enjoy admitting:

I had gotten excited about building the machine before I had proved the machine deserved to exist.

That is on me.

I also have a tendency to overtalk when I am uncomfortable.

Money conversations make me uncomfortable.

I sometimes feel too responsible for whether the other person succeeds.

That can make selling harder because instead of letting another adult make a decision, I start carrying their side of the decision for them.

Again:

That is not the market doing something to me.

That is me discovering where I need more training.

Research Can Become a Hiding Place

When the competitor research initially discouraged me, I did something useful.

I kept researching.

I mapped more than forty companies serving martial arts schools.

• Software
• Marketing agencies
• Billing companies
• Consultants
• Business coaches
• Retention systems

And that research produced an idea I genuinely like.

Maybe The Leader’s Dojo does not need to pretend to be the solution to everything.

Maybe part of being useful is being able to tell a gym owner:

“I don’t think you need me. Your problem looks like billing. Talk to these people.”

Or:

“You don’t have a retention problem. You need more qualified people coming through the front door. You should probably talk to an acquisition specialist.”

That shift felt important.

From:

How do I sell my solution?

To:

What problem does this owner actually have, and who is best equipped to help?

That feels much more like me.

But even there I have to be careful.

Because research feels good.

Research does not reject you.

A spreadsheet does not tell you no.

A competitor website does not make you uncomfortable about your price.

Eventually I have to leave reconnaissance and go back into the field.

The Dice Don’t Care About My Feelings

Hormozi tells a story about two people rolling many-sided dice.

You cannot see how many sides your die has.

You can only keep rolling.

Sometimes you hit red.

Sometimes you hit green.

You have no idea whether somebody else’s apparent success was their tenth attempt or their ten-thousandth.

I like the metaphor.

But I would add something to it.

Do not just keep making the same roll badly.

If I send an email and nobody responds, that is a roll.

If I send the same email 5,000 times and nobody responds, that is not admirable persistence.

At some point reality is trying to teach me something.

So my version is:

Roll.

Look at the result.

Learn something.

Change what needs changing.

Roll again.

Persistence without adaptation can become stubbornness.

Adaptation without persistence becomes dabbling.

Personal leadership requires both.

What “Staying in the Game” Means to Me

Here is another uncomfortable truth.

Nobody is forcing me to do this.

I am retired.

I already had a career.

I could spend my mornings reading and writing, train BJJ, travel with Amy, eat good food, and enjoy my life.

There are worse outcomes.

So why put myself through this?

That is a question I have had to ask honestly.

And the answer is not that I need to prove I am some kind of badass entrepreneur.

I do not need a hundred-million-dollar company.

I do not want to sacrifice my marriage, my health, my training, my travel, or my peace just so I can say I built a bigger business.

What I want is to see whether I can take what I have learned from construction, leadership, martial arts, coaching, mistakes, and sixty-one years of living and turn it into something genuinely useful for a small group of people.

I do not yet know how well I can do that.

That uncertainty is real.

But I want to find out.

Maybe This Is What Personal Leadership Actually Looks Like

It is easy to write about leadership when you are explaining something you already learned.

The lesson has a beginning.

A middle.

An ending.

You know what it means because you already survived it.

This one is different.

I am writing from the middle, at least I hope I'm in the middle.

I do not know whether The Leader’s Dojo becomes the business I imagine.

I do not know which parts of my current thinking survive contact with the market.

I do not know which ideas I will eventually look back on and laugh at.

I do not know how many more times I am going to get punched in the ego.

Probably a lot.

But maybe that is exactly why I should write this now.

Because personal leadership is not just the story you tell after you win.

It is how you behave while the outcome is still uncertain.

When nobody is applauding.

When the scoreboard is ugly.

When your confidence is lower than it was six months ago because now you understand how much you do not know.

When quitting would be easier.

When continuing does not mean blindly believing you will succeed.

It means being willing to take another intelligent rep.

Getting Your Ass Kicked Is Still Training

In BJJ, getting tapped is not proof that training failed.

It is training.

You made a mistake.

Someone exposed it.

You tap.

You reset.

If you are paying attention, you ask:

• Where did this start?
• What did I give away?
• What did I miss?
• What should I do differently next time?

Then you slap hands and go again.

Building this business is another mat.

Right now, I am getting tapped.

Fine.

I have been a beginner before.

The goal is not to convince myself that I am secretly winning.

The goal is to become a little harder to tap the next time.

⚔ The Dojo Drill

Maybe there is something in your life kicking your ass right now too.

• A business
• A relationship
• Your health
• Training

A project you thought would be easier.

Something you thought you were good enough to handle.

Try separating the result from the story you are telling about yourself.

Ask:

What actually happened?

Not: what does this prove about me?

• What is reality trying to teach me?
• Who is better at this than I am, and what can I learn from them?
• What part of this failure was outside my control?
• What part did I create?
• What needs to change before my next rep?

And then one more question:

Am I willing to stay in the game long enough to find out what I could become?

I do not know exactly how The Leader’s Dojo turns out.

I am not going to fake certainty just because certainty makes a cleaner newsletter.

I’m in the Valley of Despair.

Maybe I am climbing out.

Maybe I still have farther down to go.

But I know what the next move is.

Learn.

Adjust.

Take another rep.

And when I get my ass kicked again—which I probably will—

tap,

pay attention,

and get back on the mat.

📚 Leader’s Library

​Factfulness by Hans Rosling​

Why?

Because this book is a great reminder that the world in our heads is not always the world that actually exists.

We naturally notice dramatic stories, divide things into simple categories, and give more weight to bad news than slow improvement.

Rosling shows how easily those instincts can distort our judgment—and how looking at the data can change the picture.

For leaders, that matters.

Better decisions begin with seeing reality more clearly, not merely believing the story we’ve already told ourselves about it.

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