Mini Ep. 47: Investing in Loss

Speaker 1: Hey everybody, before we get started this week, I have huge news. She actually did it. We're pleased to announce that Beatrice Jin, top-ranked women's competitor in North America and long-time BJJ Mental Models premium community member, has published her first ever course with us, exclusive to BJJ Mental Models. It's called Stop Being Nice. It's a three-part audio series designed to solve real mindset problems that regular folks experience in Jiu-Jitsu. If you struggle to be aggressive and competitive in Jiu-Jitsu, you'll find the solutions here. If you're already a BJJ Mental Models premium subscriber, you've already got access, and if you are not, good news, you can get it now and get your first week free, go to BJJmentalmodels.com and check it out today. Hey, welcome to BJJ Mental Models. I'm Steve Kwan. BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent Jiu-Jitsu approach. This week in our mini episode, I want to talk about a concept called investing in loss. The idea is that if we want to get good at something, we need to spend a lot of time being bad at it first, and view loss as an investment rather than as something to avoid. I first heard this concept explained in this manner by Josh Waitzkin in The Art of Learning, and it's a really powerful concept because whenever we try something for the first time, we should expect to be bad at it. Think back to the first Jiu-Jitsu class you ever had. I am guessing it did not go well. I'm guessing that you got stomped. And if you've been training for a while, then you know it probably took you some time before you started seeing real results. Part of that is because if we want to get good at something, we have to practice it a lot, and that means we have to spend a lot of time being bad at it first. It's really easy to give up on something at the beginning because we're not good at it. So it doesn't feel fun, it doesn't make us look good, and as a result, we might try to avoid it because from an ego perspective, we try to avoid situations that aren't fun and don't make us look good. So, a big part of getting better at anything is learning to view loss as an investment. So if you show up to your first Jiu-Jitsu class and you get tapped out non-stop, cool. That wasn't a loss, that was an investment. You were investing in your future self and in your skill development. That kind of mindset will help you reframe mentally the value of these classes. So you're not looking at them as a as a win-loss record in the room, but rather you're looking at it as an opportunity to grow your skills. That will help you stay engaged and stay consistent so that at some point in the future, you might actually get good at things. You've probably had an experience like this if you've been training Jiu-Jitsu for a while. I remember when I started off at Jiu-Jitsu, like so many people, I was just not doing well. I was getting tapped all the time, non-stop. And then after I got a few stripes on my white belt, it got to the point where I could survive a little bit longer, but I I still wasn't going out there beating people, right? I was at the end of the day, I was surviving for a little bit longer, and then a little bit longer. And then eventually I got to blue belt, and it got to the point where I was getting some people, um and I started to feel like I kind of knew a little bit about this stuff. And over the years, I've refined my skills, I've added more to my tool set, uh and ultimately, now I am way ahead of where I was when I started. And ultimately, I never would have got to this point if at the beginning I had been put off of Jiu-Jitsu by the fact that I was losing. So, this is a really important mental reframe tactic, to reframe mentally so that you don't view losing in the gym as having something taken away from you, but rather you view it as adding on to your experience. Through experience, over time, you'll get better. Now, it's important also to bring up that skill development is not linear. You train for a month, and then you train for another month, that does not mean that by the second month you will be exactly twice as good as after the first month. Progress does not go up in a straight line. It's all over the place. It's chaotic. There's peaks, there's valleys. There's times when you feel like you've hit a plateau and you're just not getting better. But the trick in all of those situations is to persist and to just keep at it. And it's hard to do that if you feel like you're bad at Jiu-Jitsu, if you feel like you're losing. So that's why it's so important whenever you catch yourself feeling that way, like I am just I'm not good at this. You want to start thinking instead of this is an investment in my experience at Jiu-Jitsu, and ultimately that will result in skill down the line. This becomes important in a different way as you get more experienced because once you start to climb the ranks, now your ego is kind of a play because as a more senior member of the gym, you probably don't want to lose, especially not to someone who's less experienced than you. Now, this is a self-limiting mindset. You need to shed this mindset if you want to be good at Jiu-Jitsu. Um because if you are afraid of losing because you don't want to look bad, then you're going to avoid areas of the game where maybe you're not the greatest. You're going to rely on the things that you know work for you. And that's not a bad strategy in a competition where you need to win, but when you're in the training room, you should be focused more on skill development than on winning. And what that means is you need to be going into positions and trying things that are new to you, that you're not good at. So you may be a black belt, but if you're trying something new, you might be a blue belt at it until you get some practice. If you are afraid of loss, you will be afraid of trying those new things because you won't look like you're operating at a black belt level. So you need to shelf that fear, look at those losses as an investment, and be willing to practice those things that you're not great at, understanding that this investment in your experience will make you better over time. So if you like this concept, I recommend checking out The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin. It is an awesome book. If you're not familiar with Josh, in addition to being a chess champion, he was the child prodigy who inspired the film Searching for Bobby Fischer. He's also a push hands Tai Chi world champion, and he is Marcelo Garcia's first black belt and helped found MGinaction.com. I definitely recommend checking out his book The Art of Learning if you haven't already. And if you want more of this kind of stuff, please do continue checking out BJJ Mental Models. There are tons of episodes of our podcast, both full-length episodes and mini episodes like this that break down specific concepts. All available on BJJmentalmodels.com, and that's also where you can get access to our newsletter. Definitely recommend checking that out too. And if you want to really develop your skill set with us, BJJ Mental Models Premium is the service you can use to do that. All of that information is available at BJJmentalmodels.com. I'll put a link in the show notes, but thank you so much for listening and we'll talk to you in the next one.