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 work with needing to control everything around it.

It took me a while to see the difference.

When Capability Becomes Personal

Growing up, I had a powerful example of the kind of man I didn’t want to become.

My father.

I saw what his failures cost my mother, and I decided early that I wasn’t going to be that guy.

Not unreliable. Not incapable. Not somebody other people had to carry through life.

So I went the other direction.

I worked to get good at my trade. I took my responsibilities seriously. I wanted to know that if something needed doing, I had the skill and the discipline to do it.

Those weren’t bad ambitions. I still believe every man should work to become capable of taking care of himself and contributing something useful to the people around him.

But there’s a trap hiding inside that pursuit.

You can become so focused on being capable that you forget what your capability is supposed to be for.

I fell into that trap. And the place it caught me was a metal box full of punches and dies.

The Knockout Punch

When I worked construction in the ’80s and ’90s, we had company tools that everybody had a right to use.

One of them was the knockout punch.

And no, I don't mean a KO punch that you see in boxing or the UFC.

For anybody who hasn’t worked in the electrical trade, it’s a tool for punching holes in metal for conduit and fittings. We had kits with different-sized punches and dies, from the smaller half-inch sizes all the way up to four inches.

The bigger kits were heavy. The set came in a metal box, and hauling the whole thing around wasn’t always convenient.

(I just checked on Amazon, the kit weighs 45 pounds in a plastic case, lighter than the metal case we had back in the day.)

So guys would take the pieces they needed, rather than lug the 50 pound kit.

And inevitably, some of those pieces wouldn’t find their way back into the box.

Before long we had kits with missing parts, and that drove me nuts.

When I needed the tool, I wanted the tool, not half an hour of hunting for a die somebody borrowed and forgot.

So I started putting a complete kit together. I’d find all the pieces, organize them, keep them together.

And then I’d put that kit on my cart.

If somebody wanted to use one, I’d tell them they had to take the whole kit. Not just the pump. Not just the die. The whole damn kit. And bring it all back.

On the surface, that sounds reasonable. I was looking after expensive equipment, $1800 on Amazon.

I was making sure it was there when somebody needed it. I was taking responsibility for keeping things organized.

But there was a problem.

They weren’t my tools.

They belonged to the company. My coworkers had just as much right to use them as I did.

And there I was, deciding who could use what, when they could use it, and how they had to handle it.

I had appointed myself keeper of the knockout punches.

And I could be a real dick about it.

Being Right Doesn’t Mean You’re Leading

Here’s the uncomfortable part.

I still think I was right about keeping the kit complete. Tools work better when they’re maintained, organized, and returned with all their parts. Missing pieces waste time and money.

But being right about the problem didn’t make me right about how I treated people.

That’s the distinction I didn’t appreciate at the time.

I had standards. I had discipline. I cared about doing good work.

But I could be so protective of my work, my tools, and my way of doing things that I made it harder for other people to do theirs.

Don’t mess with my tools. Don’t interfere with my job. Don’t make my work harder.

There was a lot of my in how I approached things. Even when the equipment wasn’t mine.

I was so focused on protecting my ability to get the job done that I wasn’t thinking much about what my behavior did to the rest of the crew.

And here’s what I’d add now, with a few more decades behind me.

Being good at the work doesn’t automatically make you good to work with. You can be technically right, completely committed to doing an excellent job, and still make everyone else’s day harder than it needs to be.

The standard matters. So does how you treat the people trying to meet it with you.

The Same Lesson on the Mat

I ran into another version of this lesson in martial arts.

One of my senior instructors told me something that stuck.

Getting to black belt is mostly about you.

You’re the student. You’re building strength, learning technique, developing discipline, testing yourself, getting better at handling harder situations.

You’re working toward something.

And for a lot of people, that something is a black belt.

But then you reach first degree.

Now what?

I was surprised by how many people made it to 1st degree black belt and then quit training. They’d hit the goal, earned the rank, and for some of them that was enough.

I want to be fair here, because I don’t know why each person left. Life happens. Bodies break down. People move, change jobs, start families.

Some of them may have treated the black belt as a finish line. Some may have had reasons I never knew about.

What I do know is that something changes when you start taking on the responsibility of an instructor.

Training becomes less about how good you are and more about how well you’re helping your students develop.

• Are your students learning?
• Are they improving?
• Are they training safely?
• Is the school getting stronger?
• Are you contributing to something bigger than your own advancement?

That’s a real shift, and not everybody wants to make it.

Because being a good martial artist and being a good instructor are two different skill sets.

Just like being a good tradesman and being a good leader are two different skill sets.

Being outstanding with your hands doesn’t automatically mean you’re good at teaching someone else. And being the fastest worker on the crew doesn’t necessarily mean you know how to help an entire crew succeed.

You Can’t Do Everything Alone

There’s another thing about martial arts that took me a while to see clearly.

You can’t get very good at training with other people if nobody wants to train with you.

You need partners. You need people who challenge you, who let you practice, make mistakes, and learn. And they need the same things from you.

If every round of sparring is about proving you’re tougher, faster, or better than the person across from you, you’re missing half the relationship. You’re supposed to be helping each other get better.

The same goes on a construction site.

You might be the most capable electrician on the crew. You might be able to work circles around everybody else. But you still depend on other people. Other trades need access to the job. Other workers need the tools. Other people have schedules, responsibilities, and problems of their own.

If your excellence comes at everyone else’s expense, what exactly are you building?

A reputation for being good at your job? Or a reputation for being somebody nobody wants to work with?

Sometimes those are two very different things, and a man can have both at once.

From Protecting My Work to Improving Our Work

What I eventually had to learn is that cooperation isn’t the enemy of excellence.

You don’t lower your standards to become easier to work with. You don’t stop caring about your tools. You don’t accept sloppy work or pretend missing equipment isn’t a problem.

But you can address those problems without treating everybody around you like an obstacle.

I could have pushed to establish a better system for checking tools in and out. I could have worked with the crew to agree on keeping the punch kits complete. I could have explained why returning every piece mattered without acting like I personally owned the equipment.

Same standards. Different approach.

And probably a better result for everybody, including me.

Because a system the crew agreed on is a system that keeps working when I’m not standing next to it.

What I built instead was a system that depended on me being the guy guarding the cart, which meant I couldn’t ever not be that guy.

That’s worth sitting with, if you’re the type who’s tempted to be indispensable by controlling the small stuff.

The goal isn’t to make yourself indispensable by controlling everything. It’s to make everyone more capable by sharing what you’ve learned.

The Badass and the Bully

I still believe in becoming a badass.

I believe in being capable. I believe in building the physical, mental, emotional, and professional skills to handle what life throws at you. I believe in being a man people can count on.

But there are different ways to use that capability.

You can use it to protect your position, defend your ego, and make sure nobody gets in your way.

Or you can use it to help other people get more capable too.

The first can make you formidable. The second can make you somebody others want beside them.

And that’s the more useful kind of strength.

A bully needs other people to know how powerful he is. A capable man doesn’t have to keep proving it. He can set a standard without humiliating anybody. He can correct a problem without making it personal. He can protect himself without looking for a fight. And he can share what he knows without worrying that helping somebody else improve makes him less valuable.

Think about the tradesman who won’t teach an apprentice because he’s afraid of creating competition.

He might protect a little knowledge for himself. But he also limits what the apprentice can contribute, what the crew can accomplish, and the reputation he could build as someone who develops capable people.

Being the only person who knows how to do something isn’t always an advantage.

Sometimes it just means everybody has to wait for you.

When the Student Becomes the Teacher

This is where the martial arts lesson and the construction lesson finally come together for me.

As a student, I wanted to get better.

As a tradesman, I wanted to be capable and reliable.

Those were necessary parts of my development.

But at some point the question has to change.

Not just how good can I become?

But what good can I do with what I’ve become?

That’s the shift from building your ability and testing your ability toward sharing it. You don’t stop developing. You don’t give up your standards or abandon your ambition. You just recognize that your growth doesn’t have to end with you.

Your skills can become somebody else’s opportunity. Your experience can help somebody skip a mistake you already made. Your reliability can help a team accomplish what no individual could alone.

And your strength can become a source of support instead of intimidation.

The tricky part is that this transition doesn’t announce itself. Nobody hands you a certificate for becoming a leader. There’s no ceremony.

You begin to measure your contribution differently.

Not only by what you managed to accomplish yourself, but by what the people around you were able to accomplish because you worked together.

That’s the version of the badass I’m still working toward.

⚔ The Dojo Drill

Think about an area of your life where you’ve worked hard to become capable.

Maybe it’s your profession. Maybe it’s your training. Maybe it’s something at home.

Now ask yourself:

Am I using my capability to make things better, or am I using it to control the people around me?

Where have my standards become an excuse to be difficult? Where do I make other people pay for something that bothers me?

And where could I keep those same standards while treating the people beside me with more consideration?

You don’t have to become less capable to become more cooperative. You don’t have to become less strong to become more compassionate.

And you don’t have to stop being a badass to stop being a dick.

Sometimes the next stage of your development isn’t getting better at what you do.

It’s getting better at what you do for other people.

Train deliberately.

Live deliberately.

📚 From the Leader’s Library

​The Trusted Advisor — David H. Maister, Charles H. Green & Robert M. Galford​

Why?

Because trust is the foundation of every meaningful relationship, whether at work, at home, or on the mat.

This book introduces the Trust Equation, a practical framework for understanding what makes someone trustworthy.

More importantly, it challenges you to examine your own credibility, reliability, and ability to put others’ interests alongside your own.

Learn to build relationships where people feel safe enough to be honest, take risks, and grow.

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