Peer Pressure From Dead People

The Notice in the Mail

Yesterday, I got an official notice in the mail. I have 45 days to comply.

Here is what I have to do. When you open a DBA (doing business as...), you are legally required to announce the business by running an advertisement in a print publication.

For four consecutive weeks. If you do not do this, you are not in compliance.

I started the paperwork for my DBA a few weeks ago.

My business operates online.

My customers will find me through a website, through email, through social media, through word of mouth.

None of them, not a single one, will ever discover my business because they were flipping through the classifieds section of a newspaper that has been slowly dying for the past twenty years.

But the law says I have to do it.

So I will do it.

I will pay a print publication to run an ad that almost nobody will see, fulfilling a requirement that made sense in an era when print was the only way to reach the public, in a year when print circulation is a rounding error compared to digital reach.

A couple of months ago, I was talking with a lawyer buddy after BJJ class.

He asked me if I had run my ads yet. He was not sure if that was still a requirement.

He remembered doing it himself, almost twenty years ago, when he started his practice. He told me he still has a copy of the ad somewhere in his office.

A yellowed piece of paper from a small city newspaper that probably does not exist anymore.

I laughed at the time. It seemed like one of those charming remnants of a different era. A relic. A historical curiosity.

Then the notice arrived. It is not a curiosity. It is a requirement. I have 45 days.

This is what tradition looks like when it outlives its usefulness.

A law written for a world that no longer exists, enforced on people living in a world its authors could not have imagined.

"That's How We Have Always Done It..."

There is a phrase that stops more progress than any other.

It is not complicated. It is not malicious. It is just six words.

I heard it on jobsites for decades.

I hear it in gyms.

I hear it in business.

I hear it in conversations about politics and culture and family and every other domain where human beings gather and build habits.

The phrase is almost never an argument.

It is a surrender.

It means the person saying it has stopped thinking about whether the way they do things still makes sense.

They are not defending the tradition on its merits.

They are defending it because defending it is easier than questioning it.

Here is what that phrase actually means.

Tradition is just peer pressure from dead people.

That sounds harsh.

Some traditions are worth keeping.

Some traditions carry wisdom that took generations to accumulate.

The problem is not tradition itself.

The problem is the refusal to examine which traditions still serve us and which ones are just habits we inherited from people who were solving different problems in a different world.

The DBA law made sense when newspapers were the public square.

It makes very little sense now.

But the law has not been updated because updating laws is hard, and nobody cares enough about DBA advertising requirements to make it a priority.

So the law stays. The tradition continues.

And I will spend money on an ad nobody will see because the people who wrote the law are dead and the rest of us just keep doing what they told us to do.

The Gi and the Belt

Martial arts is full of traditions.

Some of them are beautiful.

Some of them are functional.

Some of them are just things we keep doing because nobody has asked why.

The gi. The belt system. The bow. The titles. The hierarchy.

The way class is structured. The warmups.

The techniques we teach and the order we teach them in.

Every school has traditions.

Every style has traditions.

Every lineage has traditions that were handed down from teacher to student across decades.

Some of those traditions are essential.

The bow is not just a bow.

It is a reminder that you are entering a space where ego stays at the door.

The belt system gives people a visible marker of progress. The hierarchy creates order in a room full of people who are learning to do dangerous things to each other.

But some traditions are just inertia.

The technique that everyone teaches but nobody uses in live sparring.

The warmup that was designed for athletes in 1972 and has not been updated since.

The rule about who can wear what color gi that traces back to a single instructor's preference forty years ago.

I remember being in a tournament decades ago and the guy I was competing with wore a "camouflage" gi, I was asking myself, "who thought that was cool?"

The way we do things because that is how they have always been done.

I have trained in enough different arts to see the pattern.

Every style has its own version of the DBA ad.

Something that made sense once, in a specific context, for a specific reason, that has since been elevated to the level of doctrine.

Nobody questions it because questioning it feels like questioning the art itself.

Honoring tradition is not the same as being trapped by it.

The best instructors I have ever trained under were the ones who could tell you why a tradition existed and whether it still mattered.

The worst ones were the ones who could only tell you that it had always been that way.

That's another reason why I'm loving BJJ, the competition nature of the sport has it continually evolving, adapting and changing.

The Comfort of the Past

There is a reason traditions are hard to let go of.

They are comfortable.

The past is simpler than the present because the past is finished.

You know how it turned out.

You know who won and who lost. You know which decisions were smart and which ones were foolish.

The past is a completed story.

The present is a story that is still being written, and that is exhausting.

Tradition gives you a script.

You do not have to figure out what to do.

You just do what was done before.

The script tells you how to bow, how to dress, how to address your instructor, how to structure your day, how to run your business, how to raise your kids.

If it worked for the people before you, it will work for you.

Until it does not.

The world changes.

The problems change.

The people change.

A tradition that was brilliant in 1950 might be irrelevant in 2026.

A teaching method that worked for competitive athletes might fail with healthy hobbyists who just want to get in shape and belong to something.

A marketing strategy that worked when phone books existed will not work in a world where attention is the scarcest resource.

Holding on to a tradition that no longer serves you is not respect. It is avoidance.

You are not honoring the past. You are hiding from the present.

January 6th and the Myth of the Better Yesterday

I watched, like a lot of people, as thousands of Americans stormed the Capitol on January 6th.

I watched with shame and shock and disgust.

Not because of politics. Politics comes and goes.

Policies change. Parties rise and fall.

I watched with disgust because those people were fed a lie.

The lie was that life was better "back then." That we needed to go back. That the past was a place worth breaking things to return to.

Politics aside, the psychology of that lie is worth understanding because it is the same psychology that keeps people stuck in dead traditions everywhere.

It is the belief that the answer to your problems is in the rearview mirror.

There is no going back.

That is not a political statement. It is a fact of physics.

Outside of particle accelerators, time moves in one direction. The world of 1950 is gone. The world of 1990 is gone. The world of 2019 is gone.

They are not coming back. No amount of nostalgia, no amount of anger, no amount of force will bring them back.

The only productive question is: what do we do now?

• What do we learn from the past?
• What do we carry forward?
• What do we leave behind?

How do we build something that works for the people who are alive right now, facing the problems that exist right now, using the tools that are available right now?

That is the question traditions are supposed to answer.

Not "what did they do back then."

What do we do now, informed by what they learned back then.

How to Tell the Difference

So how do you know which traditions to keep and which ones to let go of?

Here is a filter I use.

Three questions.

Does this tradition still solve a real problem?

The bow at the door solves a real problem.

It separates the outside world from the training space.

The DBA ad does not solve a real problem. It solved a real problem when newspapers were the public square.

That problem no longer exists.

Does this tradition help the people it is supposed to serve?

A belt system that gives students a sense of progress and achievement is serving them.

A tradition that makes training less safe, less effective, or less accessible is not.

If the tradition primarily serves the ego of the people enforcing it, that is a red flag.

Would we invent this tradition today if it did not already exist?

This is the hardest question and the most useful one.

If you were designing a martial arts school from scratch in 2026, would you include this rule, this ritual, this structure?

If the answer is no, you are probably keeping it out of momentum, not merit.

Ask those three questions about any tradition in your life.

Your training. Your business. Your relationships. Your habits.

Some traditions will pass easily. Some will fail.

The ones that fail are the ones you inherited from dead people who were solving different problems.

The Future Is Not the Enemy

Here is what I actually believe.

The past is worth studying.

The past is full of wisdom, hard-earned across generations of trial and error.

But the past is a teacher, not a destination.

You visit the past to learn. You do not move there.

The future is not something to fear. It is something to build.

The world is constantly changing, evolving, adapting.

That is not a flaw in the design. That is the design.

The people who thrive are the ones who can hold on to what is timeless while letting go of what is merely old.

Martial arts and combat is one of the oldest human traditions.

It has survived for tens of thousands of years because it kept changing.

Every generation adapted it to their own context.

The arts that survived are the ones whose practitioners knew the difference between the principle and the packaging.

The principle stays.

The packaging changes.

The people who built the traditions you are clinging to were not clinging to traditions.

They were innovating.

They were solving the problems of their time with the tools of their time.

They would not recognize the world you live in. And they would probably tell you to stop worshipping their solutions and start finding your own.

I am going to run my print ad. I have 45 days. I will comply with the law because the law is the law, and the cost of compliance is smaller than the cost of fighting it.

But I am not going to pretend it makes sense.

I am not going to tell myself that this is just how things are done and that is okay.

It is not okay.

It is inertia dressed up as tradition.

It is a room full of people nodding along to a rule that nobody bothered to update.

The world changes.

The rules eventually change with it.

And the people who understand that are the people who will still be standing when the traditions that outlived their usefulness finally crumble under their own weight.

Honor the past. Learn from it. Then let it go.

⚔ The Dojo Drill

Today’s training:

The Failure Reframe

Write down your last failure.

Then answer:

• What did I learn?
• How does this make me stronger?

📚 Leader’s Library

Book I recommend this week:

​The Personal MBA — Josh Kaufman​

Why?

Because it's was one of my first and to this day, one of my favorite books, to learn about entrepreneurship, business and how to work on and with yourself and others.
​
(But get the paperback version, not the audio or digital, you will thank me later.)

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