Mediocrity

As Aristotle wrote a long, long time ago, and I’m paraphrasing here, the goal is to avoid mediocrity by being prepared to try something and either failing miserably or triumphing grandly. Mediocrity is not about failing, and it’s the opposite of doing. Mediocrity, in other words, is about not trying. The reason is achingly simple, and I know you’ve heard it a thousand times before: what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.  (p. 8)

Pick A Goal

pick a goal, make a realistic plan to reach that goal, work through each step of the plan, and repeat.  (p. 12)

Learning From Losses

Some people learn to lose. Others lose and learn. The latter is a much better approach in my opinion because it focuses the mind on the positives and keeps your thoughts away from the negatives. One of my favorite Japanese proverbs is “Fall down seven times, stand up eight.”  (p. 25)

Behaviour Depends On Situation

There’s me in a hostile environment, when I need to be hard and without pity, and then there’s me when I’m in relaxed surroundings. There’s quite a difference . . . At the end of high school, I stopped talking to people, stopped connecting and just focused on myself. I discovered a darker side, a darker place in my existence. I’m not sure exactly how to explain it. I just think it was part of my evolution. I’ve been a good and nice person at times, and it has helped me win opportunities, and other times I’ve been pitiless because that’s what the situation demanded of me. (p. 38)

Avoid Casual Repetition

I was making decisions. Train instead of party. Work instead of play. Perfect practice instead of casual repetition.  (p. 40)

Gradual Improvement Over Time

One of the lessons I learned in all those years of practicing karate is that progress only comes in small, incremental portions. Nobody becomes great overnight. Nobody crams information if he wants to be able to use it over the long term. (pp. 71-72).

Think about climbing a mountain. If you decide you’re going up Everest, you don’t start with a sprint. You’ll never make it out of base camp if you do that. The secret is twofold: make sure your approach is consistent and steady so that you can maintain the progress you’re making as your journey continues.  (pp. 73-74)

Randori

The kind of practice we participated in is called randori. Essentially, it means freestyle practice of one-on-one sparring. The goal is to resist and counter the opponent’s techniques. The Japanese translation of the word randori is “chaos-taking,” or “grasping freedom.” Well, they almost fought over me. I suffered my share of whoopings. I ate a lot of randori, let’s say. I was really discouraged at first, but I went there to learn Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, to learn the art of fighting on the ground from the experts. Those guys really are the best in the world. (p. 93)

Shootboxing

You need to practice the integration of wrestling, striking and kickboxing.  (paraphrased)

Now, most people learn a little boxing, they learn a little wrestling, they learn a little Muay Thai, and they haphazardly patch them together. Then they hope for the best when they get into a mixed martial arts competition. That’s the extent of most people’s development. But the possession of great credentials in any one of the martial art components guarantees nothing in your ability to shootbox, or your ability to punch your way into a takedown. You can be a great boxer, yet be afraid to throw a punch in a shootbox—because you’re afraid of being taken down. You can be a great wrestler, but you can’t score a single great takedown—because you’re afraid of being punched in the face. And so on. Therefore, people can have what would appear to be outstanding credentials to make them a great shootboxer, and yet fail. (p. 121)

Front Foot Position

My front foot always points to my adversary. This is important because it stops my opponent from having or developing an angle on me. You can never allow that to happen because, quite simply, it exposes your blind side. It creates weakness. A fighter can’t afford to leave his flank or his blind side open, ever. Not addressing the opponent with your foot exerts a very negative influence on your power too. Misalignment reduces the power you can generate from one side of your body. So maybe you can throw a jab or a leg kick, but you make it very difficult to follow with a powerful combination from your strong side. In addition, you give the opponent more attack options while limiting your own angles and approaches. (p. 118)

Reading Opponents

My system is designed to read the other guy’s code; it’s designed to counter any attack coming my way, which complicates things for all my opponents. So first, what the heck is a fighting code?

Well, it doesn’t just exist in martial arts—it’s about the origins of all movements and how our minds respond to seeing them. In baseball, for example, you can tell someone’s going to swing the bat before the hands and arms even start moving to swing the bat—and that comes from looking at the hitter’s hips, or sometimes his eyes. Or in poker, a skill game based on your cards, and your opponent: if you are good enough, you can tell when another person is bluffing you, or trapping you. All it takes is for your eye to catch someone’s “tell,” his or her code. In any fighting art, a punch, kick or lunge has a beginning, a middle and an end. A jab, for example, starts on one side of the hips. So the code for a jab is a twitch in the hip.

When I watch my opponent, my mind automatically checks for all these signals, these codes, so that I can predict what’s coming. Each one of his tactics is connected to a code. This is why preparation and practice are so crucial in the lead-up to a fight: you practice being able to tell what the other guy is planning on doing, because one thing is for sure: your mind is faster than any part of your body, and it controls your reflex time.

This is crucial to my style of fighting, because everything I do is built on speed: recognition and reaction. Many of my takedowns, for example, actually come when most other fighters would be moving backward to avoid contact. But when my mind catches a signal that your right-hand lead is coming, I have trained myself to be ready to pounce forward and avoid contact. I dip my head to avoid the punch, I move my hand upward to ensure there’s no contact or damage, I dip my shoulder into your mid-waist area, and I try to take you down as fast as possible to gain an advantage and position. (p. 122)

Sparring

It all begins with training at very slow speeds. If you ever get a chance to visit Tristar Gym when I’m training, you can see me in the ring, boxing almost in slow motion without gloves on. My practice partner and I are taking turns throwing different punching and kicking combinations so we can recognize the code—we need to give our powerful brains the time to get used to the code. As we get warmer and better, and as our brains start developing better reaction times, we gradually speed up into full sparring mode. (p. 123)

Routine

I have a belief that all human greatness is founded upon routine, that truly great human behavior is impossible without this central part of your life being set up and governed by routine. All greatness comes out of an investment in time and the perfection of skills that render you great. And so, show me almost any truly great person in the world who exhibits some kind of extraordinary skills, and I’ll show you a person whose life is governed largely by routine. (p. 130)

Practicing A Single Technique

That’s why we get along—because John and I are both obsessively compulsive. We will spend hours repeating a single technique, over and over again until I get it right. We will repeat the move. We will sit and discuss it, then start over again. We will block out all other things. We will restart until the world dissolves completely. Until nothing else matters or even exists. We will repeat it until it is mastered, no matter when that will be. One certainty, though: it will be. (p. 130)

… Yet, many was the time that I would show a class a technique, and then I would go away and teach other classes back to back. I would look over at the far side of the academy and see Georges, still working that same technique, having gone through six or seven training partners because no one else could keep up with the intensity of his own training. (pp. 130-131)

… I have no choice, because there are two kinds of people who do martial arts: those who practice a thousand different kicks one time each, and those who practice one kick a thousand times minimum. (p. 131)

High Percentage Approach

And so the question arises: How will you control chaos? Why is it that when Georges St-Pierre is 22–2, most mixed martial artists are 10–10? Why are Georges and Anderson Silva nearly undefeated? What is different about these guys? How do they control such a chaotic situation? What I always advocated in my teaching of Georges is the high-percentage approach. Minimize the risk while maximizing the risk to your opponent. (p. 136)

Stances

The key for me was to understand the use of all fighting stances. Fighting stances meet and are are connected by an invisible thread. Your brain is the one that controls the thread and makes strategic choices. Broken down simply, here’s how my brain works it: take a boxer to the ground, keep a wrestler on his feet, and never waste energy in transition to try and bring someone to ground—it’s too tiring. Think about it. A specialist will use a lot of energy to bring you to his strength. Tactically, you have to manage this so that, even if you don’t end up in his strength area, his energy reserves are depleted compared to yours. I often let guys out of a hold because I don’t want to waste energy trying to keep them down while they just sit there, breathing, resting and thinking. (p. 137

Movement & Foot Position

I’d rather pick my spot than take one shot so I can try to deliver five in return. My body is my working tool and I don’t want to harm it, if possible. My favorite fighters are guys like Hopkins, who’s still fighting in his forties because he was able to control the big hits he took and minimize their long-term impact. He can roll with the punches. It’s all about absorption and constantly moving and staying out of the striking axis. Simply getting out of the way. Sometimes you take a shot, but not a direct shot. Roll, be fluid and never stay right in front of your opponent. (pp. 137-138)

Did you know that our toes and feet can keep our balance better than anything else? They keep us centered. Every single movement we make starts with our feet. Feet are the genesis of all movements, especially in mixed martial arts. It’s where most of our power comes from.

Think about it and try it: if your feet are not well positioned on the ground, how can you effectively change direction? If your base is not well positioned, you have to move one of your feet first, then apply pressure to generate movement, then move the other foot, and only then can you generate any kind of power or momentum. This sounds a lot like walking, I know. In the octagon, or on the basketball or tennis court, or when you’re running after a ball or trying to deke your opponent, walking isn’t the solution. It takes time and it wastes energy. By being in the right position to begin with, you save time and energy, and you maximize power. (pp. 152-153)

The elementary truth is that feet are all about posture; they determine how you carry yourself. They play a role, whether you slouch or stand upright with your shoulders rolled back. (p. 155)

Keep Moving

To me, Georges is an ant. Everything he does can be compared to ants and how they live, what their existence is about. First of all, Georges is always going somewhere. He always has a place to go. He never stops moving, he never stops doing things that will get him closer to his goal, no matter what. And that’s because he’s part of a greater idea. (p. 158)

Strengths and Weaknesses

What happens when you accept and embrace your fear? Fear becomes your weapon. Some people are totally incapable of seeing fear as an opportunity to get better at something. To develop the best version of themselves.  (p. 162)

The big lesson here is this one: fight his weaknesses and avoid his strengths. (p. 176)

Mindset

“You don’t get better on the days when you feel like going. You get better on the days when you don’t want to go, but you go anyway.” (p. 178)

Rest

But I’d been working out less than before. It makes me feel so dumb for all the years I did things wrong. Now I know: resting is growing. (p. 187)

Train With Resisting Opponents

There are times when hitting the bags is important, but those decrease in importance as my expertise grows. Bruce Lee talked about this a lot. Hitting the bags or the dummies is good to create muscle memory while I’m trying to perfect a movement—a punch or a kick. But it means nothing else. Once I learn a movement or a style of kick well, I need to perform it against a willing opponent. (p. 187)

Luck and Movement

Knowing yourself lets you differentiate between luck and movement. It places them at opposite ends of the spectrum. Luck is not within anybody’s control or prediction. It occurs, and it’s great when it does, but you can’t base your entire life on it. Movement, on the other hand, puts success within reach. The more you know about yourself, the better your movement through all facets of life. (p. 191)