Learn to Laugh While You’re Getting Your Ass Kicked

Sometimes the difference between breaking and getting stronger is what you do after everything goes wrong.

You’ve had one of those weeks.

You make a mistake. Then another. You fix one problem and accidentally create two more. Something that should’ve taken twenty minutes eats three hours. And just when you think you’ve finally got things under control, life punches you in the mouth.

Again.

What do you do with that?

You can get angry. You can beat yourself up. You can decide you’re an idiot who can’t get anything right.

Or you can laugh.

Not because any of it is funny. But because the absurdity of getting your ass kicked over and over starts to look comical after a while. And that laugh, strange as it sounds, might be what gets you back on your feet.

When Life Starts Fighting Back

Here’s a thing that happens when you start getting better at something.

The challenges get harder. The people who used to go easy on you stop going easy. The problems you used to avoid become problems you’re finally capable of facing. And suddenly you’re getting your ass kicked again, which feels exactly like going backward.

But what if it isn’t? What if the reason life feels harder is that you’re finally playing at a higher level?

That’s not always true. Sometimes you’re just making mistakes, and the mistakes are the whole story.

The trouble is that both things look identical from the inside. Hard is hard. Whether the dial went up because you got better or because you’re doing something wrong, your body and your frustration level don’t necessarily know the difference.

I ran into both versions last week, on two unrelated fronts, and getting them confused nearly cost me.

The first was business. I’ve been learning newsletter software, and the software was winning. I made mistakes with tagging and segmentation, and a couple of them hit the Daily Dojo itself. I double-scheduled. I missed a day. The kind of errors that make you feel like you’re ruining something you actually care about.

By midweek I was convinced I was just screwing everything up.

Then there was Sunday open mat.

Everybody Was Palming My Head

Three upper belts independently spent their rolls with me using head-palm framing. That’s a way of controlling somebody’s movement and distance by putting a hand on their head, and it’s roughly as annoying as it sounds.

By the third time, I asked one of them what the deal was.

The answer, as best I remember it, was that I was getting harder to deal with, so they had to raise their own level. I was getting better.

Which is the most backhanded compliment I’ve ever received, and one of the best. The extra difficulty wasn’t a sign I’d collapsed. It was evidence somebody had noticed something and adjusted to it.

The difficulty went up because the level went up. Not because the universe decided to punish me.

The world doesn’t hand you a memo saying “your challenges are now harder because you’re more capable.” It just turns the dial, and you feel the dial turning. So you need to figure out which kind of hard you’re in.

Two Kinds of Hard

That distinction is worth slowing down for, because it’s the part of this I’m still learning.

There’s a difficulty that shows up because you’ve outgrown your old level. The upper belts had to change how they rolled with me because what they used to do wasn’t working anymore. That’s a hard that means you’re climbing.

And there’s a difficulty that shows up because you’re making an avoidable mistake. Scheduling something twice. Rolling in a way that gets you hurt. Missing something obvious that was right in front of you. That’s a hard that means you’re not paying attention.

They feel the same. Both are tiring. Both are embarrassing. Both make you want to say “what is wrong with me.”

But they can point in different directions. And sometimes both are happening at once: you’re facing a harder challenge and making mistakes while you learn to handle it.

If you treat the first kind like the second, you’ll beat yourself up for progress. You’ll look at tougher challenges and conclude you’re getting worse, and you’ll quit at the exact point where your work is starting to pay off.

If you treat the second kind like the first, you’ll feel noble about mistakes you should be fixing. You’ll tell yourself the hard is just the price of growth, when actually it’s the price of a habit you haven’t corrected.

I’ve done both. Last week I did both in the same seven days.

Sunday’s palming was the first kind. My challenge had gotten harder because I’d gotten better, and I nearly read it as evidence I was drowning.

But Sunday’s missed tap was the second kind, and that’s a different lesson.

Feedback That Reads Like Punishment

Sunday wasn’t a victory lap.

I rolled three rounds in a row with a larger purple belt so he wouldn’t have to sit out and wait for a partner. Somewhere in one of those rounds an arm got tangled up, and I focused on the wrong thing. I spent all my attention protecting my elbow and never registered that the threat was my shoulder. I didn’t tap when I should have, and I felt it afterward.

Then during Wednesday's noon class I hurt my left thumb during a roll, I don't even know when or how.

Between the right shoulder and the left thumb, ordinary stuff got harder this week. Which is its own kind of lesson, and not a flattering one.

Here’s where I want to be honest, because this is the exact place the article could go wrong.

An injury I caused by failing to tap isn’t antifragility. That’s not a stress that made me stronger. That’s me missing information, choosing the wrong problem, and paying for it. The mat gave me clean feedback and I read it too late.

Pain is not a curriculum. It doesn’t automatically teach you anything.

If it did, every injured person would come back wiser. We all know how often that’s true.

The mistake wasn’t moral. It was a targeting problem. I was watching the wrong hinge. My elbow was fine. My shoulder was in trouble, and I spent the whole sequence guarding the door that wasn’t about to get kicked in.

Looking back, I can identify what I missed. That’s useful feedback, but only if I act on it. Hindsight alone doesn’t make the next roll safer.

You’ve had your own version. You defended the wrong thing. You watched the wrong indicator. You poured effort into the part of the job, the conversation, the project that wasn’t the problem.

That one deserves a fix. Not a moral verdict. A fix.

Somebody Noticed I Laugh

On Wednesday, an instructor who doesn’t work see me all the time said something I’ve been thinking about since.

He noticed I laugh a lot while I’m rolling.

He’s right. I do. My wife has a name for it: gallows humor.

And it took me straight back to the Hapkido years.

I was the demonstration partner for Master Han and his senior instructors, often. Which meant being on the receiving end of joint locks, throws and other uncomfortable situations, in front of the whole class, with a room watching.

When that happens, you have a choice about where to put your attention.

Mine went inward, my wife told me it's called proprioception, into the forces and angles and tension in my body, almost like a puzzle I was working on while it was happening.

And for whatever reason, I laughed. Often.

Enough that the other students had a saying.

“It must hurt. Chuck is laughing.”

I still do it in BJJ, thirty-some years later.

Now, I don’t know exactly what the laughter is. I suspect it changes something in me, physically and emotionally.

I know that when I turn my mind to something genuinely depressing, my energy drops, and when I turn it to something actually funny, I get a lift. That’s my own observation about my own body, not a claim about yours.

Whether it’s a coping mechanism, a pressure valve, or something else, I couldn’t tell you.

What I can tell you is that it doesn’t solve anything.

The mistake’s still there. The shoulder still hurts. The tagging still needs fixing.

But laughter creates room.

Room to breathe. Room to think. Room to be a person having a hard week instead of a failure who deserves one.

And that room turns out to be where the two kinds of hard get sorted out. You can’t tell which one you’re in while you’re drowning in it. You need a few feet of air before you can look at the week and say, okay, which was this.

The Difference Between Surviving and Growing

​Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote a book called Antifragile.

The central idea is that some things don’t merely withstand disorder and stress. They benefit from it.

Think about muscle. Apply an appropriate amount of stress, give it time to recover, and it can grow stronger. Apply too much, skip the recovery, and you get injured.

That’s the honest version of the idea, and it matters more than the slogan.

Stress without recovery isn’t growth.

It’s just wear.

Getting beaten up doesn’t automatically make you better. Making mistakes doesn’t automatically make you wiser. Suffering doesn’t automatically build character. Sometimes it just leaves you beaten up, frustrated, and tired.

The growth, when it comes, is in what you do afterward.

You notice what happened. You figure out what you can learn. You make an adjustment. You recover. You come back.

Maybe a little smarter. Maybe a little stronger. Maybe just a little less afraid of failing.

And laughter keeps showing up in that process. Not as the thing that fixes it. As the thing that lets you stay in the room long enough to do the fixing.

What the Laughter Is Actually For

Let’s get the claim straight, because there’s a lazy version of this article that says laughing at your problems solves them. It doesn’t.

Here’s what I think it does.

It breaks the verdict.

Most of us, when something goes wrong, do the same thing. We take the event and turn it into a judgment. I made a mistake becomes I am a mistake. The schedule got double-booked becomes I can’t be trusted with the newsletter. One bad day becomes evidence about the whole life.

Laughter interrupts that translation.

It’s hard to be fully convinced you’re a lost cause while you’re genuinely laughing at the absurdity of your own week. The verdict loses its grip for a second. And in that second, you can look at what actually happened instead of what you’ve decided it means about you.

That’s also the moment you can ask which kind of hard you just went through. Because the verdict is what makes the question impossible. If you’re already a failure, every difficulty proves it, and you never get to the useful part where you sort progress from repetition.

It’s a doorway, not the room. Laughter gets you back to the work. It doesn’t do the work for you.

And it’s worth saying plainly: this doesn’t work the same for everyone, and it shouldn’t be forced. Nobody has to find their own worst week funny.

If what you need right now is to be angry, or quiet, or to talk to somebody, that’s a reasonable response to a hard season too.

The point isn’t that you have to laugh. The point is that if it comes naturally, you might be handing yourself something useful without realizing it.

Tomorrow, Get Back Up

Maybe you’ve had a week like mine.

You screwed something up. Maybe several things. Maybe it was public. Maybe it cost money, or time, or somebody’s trust. Maybe you’ve been embarrassed, disappointed, frustrated, or flat on your ass.

Fine.

You’re still here.

Take a moment. Find something in it to actually laugh at, something absurd and true rather than something forced. Then look at what happened and decide what you’re going to do differently.

The mistakes are still there. So is the injury. So is the newsletter that needs to go out.

But you can stop treating any of it as a verdict.

Because the goal isn’t to become someone who never gets knocked down.

It’s to become someone who knows how to get back up, and who can learn something on the way down.

And maybe, just maybe, you can learn to laugh while you’re doing it.

⚔ The Dojo Drill

Pick one thing that went wrong in the last week. Just one, not the whole pile.

Then work through four short questions.

1. Is this the same old problem, or a harder one? Check the dial. Did the difficulty go up because you did, or because you’re repeating something you could fix?
2. What was I guarding that didn’t need guarding? Every bad week has a version of this. The wrong hinge. The wrong indicator. The wrong email. Name yours.
3. What’s the smallest thing I could laugh at, then change? Not the whole situation. One absurd detail and one adjustment you can actually make this week.
4. What would tell me the difference? If this difficulty is progress, the challenge may look different next month. If it’s a repeating mistake, you may see the same pattern again. Write down what you’d expect to see either way, so future-you can check.

You don’t have to find your worst moment funny. You don’t have to make yourself laugh.

But if you can, even a little, you might find some room in there.

Room to think. Room to sort. Room to adjust.

📚 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.