Ep. 367: The Weight of Expectations, feat. Jesse Phillips

Speaker 1: Hey everybody, before we get started this week, I just want to let you know, we released a new mindset course featuring Rob Bernaki from Island Top Team and BJJ Concepts. It's called Mindset for Betas. It's an amazing resource that breaks down a new way to build a resilient Jiu-Jitsu mindset. It's part of BJJ Mental Models Premium. I will spare you the full sales pitch because you can try it for free. Just go to BJJmentalmodels.com/beta. I will give you a free month, you can check out the course and if you decide that it's not worth your money, you can cancel, you won't have to pay a cent. I've already been told by subscribers that this is the most valuable piece of Jiu-Jitsu content they've ever received, so I hope you like it too. Hey everybody, welcome to BJJ Mental Models episode 367. I am Steve Kwan. BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent Jiu-Jitsu approach. And I'm here today with a first timer, but a very well-connected friend of our community. I've got Jesse Phillips on the line from Gentle Giant Jiu-Jitsu. Jesse, how's it going? Speaker 2: Hey, it's good. I'm excited to be here. I'm nervous. Also, I'm impressed because I didn't know that you recorded that line live every episode. I thought that was just like a pre-recorded snippet and you just nail it so smooth. I'm impressed. Speaker 1: You know, I've been thinking about shuffling it up and shaking it up and coming up with something new, but I don't know. Do people want me to say the same thing every single time at the beginning or do I have to be witty? I hope I don't have to be witty. I don't have the energy. Speaker 2: I hope I don't I don't have to be witty. Speaker 1: Well, let's get into your backstory, man, because that's going to prove very relevant here for the topic at hand. Why don't you give yourself a quick introduction, both you and your new gym? Speaker 2: Yeah, well, so this is, you know, our what, third time trying to record this and so I've been trying to think like, what's my elevator pitch for myself? And I don't even know. I'm just Jesse. I'm here in Seattle, Washington. I am 39 years old. I'm a Jiu-Jitsu black belt under Brian Johnson here in Seattle. I've got a new gym in a nice little neighborhood. The gym is called Gentle Giant Jiu-Jitsu. We've been open since August and I have an unusual life that's led me to where I'm at now, achieving a dream that I never thought I actually would have. And, you know, now I'm living it. I'm just teaching Jiu-Jitsu full-time now. That's what I do. Speaker 1: Well, let's talk about that dream because that is exactly the topic we want to get to here and how you came to this point in your life. Now, to set the table, we have talked about burnout several times recently on the BJJ Mental Models podcast family. On the main feed, we just did an episode on this and independently of this, without any suggestion from me, Emily Kwok and Jo Hannon just did a burnout episode on the highest levels, which is one of the podcasts that we've got on BJJ Mental Models Premium. And every time we dig into this topic, it always resonates with people. It's also an incredibly broad and personal topic. It's one of those things where I don't know if there's a right or a wrong way to deal with burnout. I think it's very individualized. So, my thought is, the best way that we can help people solve this problem is just by presenting it from as many different angles as possible. And let's start with yours. You have a journey quite similar to mine. You came from, you know, the corporate world and moved into Jiu-Jitsu, but let's maybe talk about that and how burnout has impacted you along the way. Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I mean, I think what you said, like there's no right or wrong way. I think that's, you know, that's definitely like the way to take it. It's so individualized. But, you know, just like martial arts or, you know, any kind of creative endeavor or intellectual endeavor, you know, while there's not a one-size-fits-all approach, there are, you know, maybe some frameworks that that can work for people. I guess that's what mental models is all about, right? It's like building those mental models that help people through that. So, you know, my path here to where I'm at now has been long and very unusual. I mean, I don't know how unusual it is. You know, maybe maybe Jiu-Jitsu gym owners all have kind of strange backgrounds like me. But I started martial arts when I was 16 years old. I started with Taekwondo and I, well, actually, I started Taekwondo when I was eight. I did it for a little bit and I loved it. My mom took me out of it for some reason. And then I was a fat, lazy teenager who just liked to play video games all day. But my mom wanted me to get out of the house and get some exercise and there was a Taekwondo school that opened up in town. So, we signed up and I just fell in love with it again right away. And I got the opportunity to start teaching as an assistant instructor when I was 19 and I just immediately fell in love with teaching. Just being able to share, you know, the art that I loved and, you know, being able to share it with kids of all ages and adults. The like act of teaching for me was as much an opportunity to learn because I take it really seriously and so how do I take these esoteric ideas that are, you know, naturalized or ingrained through repetition and training and how do I communicate that to, you know, somebody who's brand new on the mats? And how do I communicate that to like a five-year-old beyond just like, okay, now you put your hand out in the air like this and that's how you do a punch. There's so much more information there that you can convey to all ages and you just have to really dig deep and understand what it is that you're doing and then how you communicate that effectively. So I fell in love with teaching when I was fairly young, you know, 19 years old. And the gym that I was teaching at is actually probably where I experienced my first burnout because the owner of that place was, I'm not going to name him, but he was he was a piece of shit. The worst boss I've ever had in my life and he drove everybody away from him in his life. Every assistant instructor he ever had. I was the one that lasted the longest, me and his ex-wife now. But he'd had he just burned through other assistant instructors and, you know, I lasted the longest. I was there. I stuck it out for, God, three and a half years or something like that. And, uh, you know, while I loved teaching and that's what kept me around, I mean, he was an abusive personality and it took me a long time to realize that because unfortunately those types of people were just normalized for me in my childhood. And so, you know, I put a lot of myself into that work. I took it so, so seriously. I was really dedicating myself to it and trying to be the best teacher I could for every single student I had, while also trying to figure out who I was as a young adult and figure out how to live my life and how to just like be independent and be responsible and also navigating a really toxic relationship with the head coach there. And, you know, it eventually crashed and burned and I left there when I was 22. You know, I was prompted to go back to college at that point. Ended up going to art school. Ended up going to the college of my dreams actually, DigiPen here in Redmond, Washington, going to school for art and animation. And there I experienced more burnout because I again was so invested. I put all of myself into school and I struggle with academics. I hated school when I was growing up. Junior high and high school were just struggles for me. It was tedious, it was boring. All of the classwork was dull. You know, I I was one of those kids that's like, well, if I can pass the test, why the fuck do I have to do the homework? It's just such a huge waste of time. And so when I went back to college, I didn't want to carry that mentality with me. And so I kind of flipped the opposite and I just went whole hog, right? Just really trying to do absolutely everything I could, which meant that I was stretching myself really thin. I got really involved in, you know, extracurricular activities in the college, you know, becoming art council president, the student government president. I was a teacher's assistant for animation courses. I was a figure drawing moderator. I was also married. I got married at 25. I started at DigiPen at 24 after a couple years in community college. Then I got married in the summer after my freshman year there. And so I was also like trying to like be as good of a husband as I could while I was also going to this grueling, grueling institution where I was just stretching myself too thin. And I did that for several years and then I broke again. I burned out, crashed hard and I dropped out. You know, I just couldn't do it anymore. I didn't realize the mistakes that I was making at the time of just like not being able to say no. Anytime anybody asked me to do anything, like, oh, hey, we're going to nominate you to be the art council president. I was like, oh, okay, yeah. I don't know why me, but if you guys think I'm the one to do it, I'm going to do it. I'm going to do my best. And then same thing with the student government. And so I again crashed and burned hard. And then, you know, experienced, you know, a bout of serious depression. And, you know, I didn't know what I was going to do and ended up getting a job in as a contractor for Xbox Live from a friend that I'd made while I was going to school. And that's the job that, you know, kind of put me on the path to my tech career. And I stuck that out for 12 years. You know, worked in tech. I was at Xbox Live for seven years, working in online safety and fraud. And I developed a lot of expertise in, you know, that domain as well as self-teaching data science and project management. We were a pretty small team responsible for a lot of stuff going on on that platform. And so I, you know, was lucky to have the opportunity to, you know, kind of see problems and then attempt to solve them. And, you know, that required me to do my own research and do my own self-education in data science and learning how to work with huge sets of data. And there's my tech career. And, you know, while I was going back to DigiPen, I got back into martial arts. I was like, I wasn't done with it. I was done with that previous school and I wasn't done with martial arts and I knew that. You know, I had two years off and then I went back to Taekwondo for a couple more years. And after a couple more years of Taekwondo, I had 10 years of Taekwondo under my belt at that point and I developed really strong opinions about the way that martial arts should be taught and I could not find that in Taekwondo. Like, I loved the art because of the potential that it had, but it was just rife with McDojos. And, you know, the last school that I was at, I was seeing like, you know, 12-year-olds get black belts, you know, the same type of black belt that the adults were getting. And I was seeing adults get black belts after two years of training where it's like, I mean, you can't actually do any like effective martial art, you know, with the training environment that we were in. And so I was, you know, disenchanted with Taekwondo, but still, you know, believed in, you know, the utility and the power and the benefit of martial arts. And so I was like, well, what do I want to do next? I've done done striking a lot. Let's go find some grappling. And let's try Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu because I've heard a lot of good things about that. And then 2015, I went to my first gym, Maple Valley, Washington, Phantom Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. And my very first class, I just fell in love with it because the structure of the class and the culture of the gym was exactly what I was looking for. It was it was perfectly in line with what I thought martial arts training should be. Warm-ups that are in line with the movements that you're doing rather than just being a bunch of calisthenics, you know, like jumping jacks and push-ups. Focused time to work on specific details, you know, technical movements and then actual sparring to like put that stuff to test. I also got the opportunity to get my ass absolutely kicked by my first coach, which was a blast. I really love getting to roll with people who are way better than me. And my first coach was half my size. I'm a big guy. I'm 6'3", 285 right now. At that point, I was 300 pounds. I've been doing a couple years of powerlifting. I had my Taekwondo black belt and I was like, I know I don't know grappling, but like I'm big, I'm athletic, I'm flexible, like, you know, I feel like maybe I can hold my own for a little bit. And holy shit, was that not true at all. I just got rolled up and I felt like I'd never used my human body at all in my life. And, you know, I just fell in love with it like day one. And so I was working, you know, going back into martial arts, working in my tech career, you know, just kind of stumbling forward on this on this professional career path. You know, I was an art school dropout who ended up doing technical project management and data analysis bordering on data science with the type of work that I was doing with data. And I just kind of kept stumbling forward and getting, you know, taking on more and more responsibilities. And at that point, I at least realized that I needed to set boundaries for myself and make sure that I wasn't like setting myself up for burnout anymore. But I also was getting to a point in the progression of my career that I was starting to have to deal with conflicts of my values, right? As you get to a point in a professional career and you take on roles of greater responsibility, management, directorship, whatever. Depending on the company, you are often faced with like having to make decisions on behalf of the company that might be in direct conflict to your own internal values. And as my career advanced, those decisions were things that I were I was facing more and more. And saw the paths before me of like, okay, I can find comfort and stability in tech and I can do well. I can make good money. I can, you know, have like a retirement set up. I can do all of this. But I also have to be able to swallow the pill of making decisions on behalf of a company that I don't agree with and that do conflict with my own values as an individual. And a lot of people, you know, are able to swallow that pill. And I realized that I'm not as comfortable doing that. And so I was like, well, maybe it's time for me to like see if I can actually do this martial arts gym thing. You know, I'd been training Jiu-Jitsu for 10 years. I've been, you know, I've been doing Taekwondo for 10 years. I've been a martial artist for 20 years. I've got leadership experience. I've got experience teaching. You know, I taught when I was at DigiPen, teaching animation classes to kids. I was a personal tutor for illustration for 10 plus years. And so I was like, you know, I know how to teach. I know how to organize a project. I know how to run a business, you know, through the lens of project management. And at some point over the course of that 20-year span between 19-year-old Jesse realizing he loved teaching and that owning my own gym one day would be amazing. And 39-year-old Jesse facing a future that just felt grim and unsatisfying. Somewhere along that path of like growth and development, I had overcome the hurdle of self-belief. For a long time, I was like, I want to do this, but I don't know if I'm the guy, right? And at some point, I don't know exactly when, I just realized one day, I was like, oh, I can do this. The voice is still there of like, I don't know if I'm the guy, but the voice isn't there very strong anymore. And like, if I'm not the guy, well, then it won't work and that's okay. I'll figure out the next thing to do. But, I don't know, it turns out that like, maybe I am the guy that can do this. Speaker 1: Yeah, very well said, man. And of course, a story that's near and dear to me. I have also worked in the same industry as you. And I think people at this point in time are familiar with the stories, but working in tech and especially game development is like these are jobs that are designed to maximize burnout sometimes. It feels like a lot of these companies, they exist to be exploitative in some ways. Their goal is to extract as much value out of especially the young, impressionable people who just feel like, hey, I'm just lucky to have this opportunity to live my dream, work at a game company, make video games that's so cool. And it's really easy to get into this relationship with that kind of company where you are just giving and giving and giving and they just keep on taking. And I see similar things happen in Jiu-Jitsu because again, it's another passion job where people get into this because they love it. I mean, who who wouldn't dream of being able to pay the bills doing Jiu-Jitsu and doing their hobby all the time. But the result is there will be people who take advantage of that. We've heard so many stories on this podcast of people who have been basically coerced into teaching for free at their gym. And of course, you hear all of these culty stories of gym owners just taking serious advantage of their students in ways that you would never get away with in another business. All of that kind of stuff leads to burnout. And I think that when we talk about burnout, again, there's many reasons why burnout can happen. And I'm hesitant to just prescribe something here because everyone's journey is going to be completely unique here. We all get to burnout and we all get out of burnout in different ways. But one situation that really leads to a lot of burnout is when you feel like your relationship with the sport is not being reciprocated. You're giving and giving and giving and you just aren't getting anything back out of it. I mean, we can talk all day long about hustle and grind and working your ass off, but you can't keep that kind of motivation going forever if you're not getting something out of it. If you're just giving and giving and you're never getting back, burnout is pretty much inevitable. Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I mean, talking about like the exploitation in game development. I had an interview for I don't know, I don't know if we want to like name them on the podcast for a lead program management position that I would have been the one responsible for their 24/7 esports broadcasting program. You know, live service, 24/7 global coverage, lead program manager. So like lead producer, I guess was the title. But, you know, the person who was in charge from making sure that that shit was running, like seamless, smooth, coordinating all of the different groups that were involved in the actual production of their esports stuff. And, you know, in this interview, like they asked me what my salary expectation was and I gave them a number and then they're like, oh, well, our starting rate is they said $50,000 less than I was asking for. And then also required relocation to where their headquarters are. And I'm like, so you want me to take a pay cut that's two-thirds of what I'm asking for and move to a place that's got a higher cost of living and work a job that's going to have a higher degree of stress, greater responsibility and a greater likelihood of like spectacular failure. Like that's insane. Who are you actually hiring for? It's exactly like you said, they're hiring for the person who's willing to make unreasonable sacrifices for something that they feel really passionate about. And going back, looping this back into martial arts, like that's what my experience was when I was teaching Taekwondo. I was just fully invested and I was making sacrifices and I was just taking abuse because I loved Taekwondo and I loved teaching. I loved my students and I just put up with way too much for way too long. And, you know, I got to a point where like, yeah, the investment wasn't reciprocated, right? I'd actually been demoted at one point, right? I was I was there as an assistant instructor for three years and, you know, that's normally how long it takes for somebody to get a black belt in Taekwondo. I started as a red belt and I ended as a red belt, right? After like three years of like full-time working there, you know, helping run the before and after school program and teaching classes all ages. I was doing like I even did like midday private lessons at one point for some adults that were asking for it. And like, I just got treated like shit for years and it took me so long to like get my eyes open and realize like, oh, this is actually a really shitty situation and I can probably find and do better for myself. Like it doesn't have to be like this. It can feel like when you're in it, like, well, this is my opportunity, right? And if I fuck this up, am I going to have the opportunity again? And that's for me a lot of times what has led to that burnout of, you know, feeling like I can't let go of that potential opportunity because, well, if I do, is it going to come my way again? And am I going to live a life of regret because I decided to follow a path of of health instead of, you know, sacrifice and grind, which, you know, I have my own rant about that kind of culture in the modern society. But, you know, I think that's a trap that a lot of people get into is that, oh, I'm doing this thing that I love. I'm getting paid or I'm able to teach. I'm able to like give back. I'm able to like really lean into this thing that I'm passionate about. Am I going to have this opportunity again? Or if I leave this, you know, what happens next? Speaker 1: That's very well said. And I think the reason a lot of employers get away with this is because they position their offer as this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. This is your make-it-or-break-it moment. And it's very easy, especially if you're a young and impressionable person in that situation to see that offer in front of you and think, I have to take this. I have to bend over backwards and do everything that these people want of me because this is my big break. This is my moment. And so I've got to impress these people. I've got to give them everything that I can. And maybe at the very beginning of your career, I can understand that. Maybe it is true that that's the only way you can get an offer. But if you can only get into a situation by basically abusing yourself, right? If you can only get into a situation by being completely unreasonable to yourself and giving way more than you get in return, you're basically signing up for an abusive relationship. And you're locking yourself into that. And is that really what you want to be doing? I mean, is it really your dream job if you're creating an environment where you are going to be abused for the remainder of your professional life? Probably not. So, with the benefit of hindsight now, having been young and started new things before, I also at one point felt like you had to give everything to the cause, even if it wasn't your cause. If your boss told you to do something, you had to give everything to it. And honestly, I I thought that was going to be how to build a career, but really at the end of the day, that just creates a relationship with that employer and an expectation that, oh, well, this is what Steve does. He's the guy who gives everything and never gets anything in return for it. And people will start to take advantage of that. They will get comfortable with having you around in that role. And so often people think, well, if I just do this long enough, I'll succeed. I'll get promoted. I'll get the big opportunities. Honestly, no, you won't. The people who work the hardest are from my experience, not always the ones who get the best opportunities. They just get pigeonholed into those roles of, oh, well, this is the guy who's willing to kill himself for this job. If we need someone to work until midnight tonight, we're going to ask Steve because we know he'll say yes. And what you find often, if you are that person who is busting their ass more than everybody else, when it comes time for you to go and ask for that promotion, you might find that you don't get it. And you may in your mind think, well, I worked my ass off. Don't I deserve this? But from the perspective of the person who's benefiting from all your hard work, they don't want to promote you into a management job. They want you where you are because you're working way harder than you should in that role. You're giving them more value than they're paying for. Why wouldn't they want to keep you in that role for the rest of your life? So this was a big realization to me that getting ahead is not always about giving and giving and giving. That just locks you into this abusive pattern of giving too much and never getting back. And that is such a huge cause of burnout. And I see that in Jiu-Jitsu so often, especially with young athletes, young business owners who open up a gym. They put so much into it and they can dance around this and decorate this up and make excuses for poor performance and say, oh, well, it's a labor of love. I don't really expect to be super successful. But look, man, you're just not going to be able to maintain the passion of doing this for a long time if you're giving and you're not getting out of it. I really think that young people in this sport, whether they be competitors or whether they be people trying to make a living out of this sport, at some point, you've got to stop being the sacrificial lamb and you've got to start advocating for yourself and getting what you're worth. And I think that when we talk about burnout, this is one of the main causes of burnout is people just eventually realize, I am not getting an ROI on this sport. I am not seeing returns for what I'm investing in it. And that's why they burn out. I wonder sometimes why we see so many people drop off at blue belt and then again, we see a lot of businesses just peter out. I think a lot of it is just because people aren't getting rewarded. They're not getting results for the love and the effort that they put in. Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, Jiu-Jitsu's athletics are complicated in the fact that like youth is important if you want to be a competitive athlete, right? But for most of the rest of things in life, it's actually a faulty culture that we kind of exist within, which is this cult of youth, right? If I'm not successful, or if I haven't made a name for myself, if I haven't accomplished X, Y and Z by whatever age, then maybe I'm just not good enough or maybe I'm not going to succeed or, you know, maybe other people are better than me or whatever. You know, there's this idea that like, you're supposed to have achieved something by some arbitrary age. And if you don't, then, well, maybe the time has passed. And for most things in life, that's just not true. But when it comes to like being a competitive athlete, yeah, that's absolutely true, right? There's going to be a time and a place that, you know, athletics will actually work because your body is capable of doing that. So, you know, there is a youth component to that, but, you know, that doesn't mean that you have to spend your youth sacrificing yourself for like people or a gym in a place that actually isn't getting you what you want. And, you know, that's what happened to me. When I was doing Taekwondo, my first coach, he was like, oh, Jesse, I want to like train you for the Olympics. And I, you know, totally bought into it. He was like a former world champion. He was old school Taekwondo grandmaster. I think he was a world champion before Taekwondo was even in the Olympics. But I was like, oh, yeah, I totally believe this guy. And so, you know, just throwing myself into it and then not actually getting out of it what I wanted. And so, you know, just wasting years of youth and competitive potential in an environment, in a relationship, an abusive relationship that ultimately was not getting me where I wanted to go. And at the time, right, this was 2004, 2005, 2006, right? So this was like, yeah, the internet existed, but like the availability of information and stories of people going through things was just so limited. And so I didn't know. I didn't know what I didn't know. But I think people now generally have, at least in, you know, the US, Canada, other industrialized nations that have access to like money, have access to resources, have access to information, are in, you know, a metropolitan area where they have access to like gyms. You know, they have the opportunity to realize like, well, I'm getting fucking shafted here and I don't need to put up with this. But not everybody gets that opportunity because, well, maybe you fell in love with this thing and the only gym that you've got available to you is this one place within a 200-mile radius. What do you do at that point? If you're a young person who really loves this thing, really wants to commit yourself to this thing and it feels like the only opportunity for you is right here where you have to stick out this abusive relationship. Like it's it's what do you do? Do you have the means to be able to do something else? Are you able to like uproot yourself and go move somewhere else and do this a new location in a new community that maybe is healthier and fosters, you know, your growth and your independence and your aspirations within the sport. But maybe you're not privileged or lucky enough to be able to do that. And so, do you grit it out and become the survivor who makes it through that shitty situation and and, you know, is able to accomplish what you're dreaming in spite of your circumstances or do you suffer burnout and fizzle out and, you know, find yourself driven away from something that you loved because you're only human. Speaker 1: Yeah, I love that you talked about survivorship bias. This is a concept that is very near and dear to me because especially in Jiu-Jitsu, we tend to get hyperfixated on the survivors, the people who made it to the top of the podium, built incredible competitive runs and careers in Jiu-Jitsu. Obviously, they're more visible. They hang around, they take up the spotlight. We're amazed by their accomplishments. And so we look at them and think that maybe this is some sort of normal path, not realizing that actually those survivors are the extreme outliers. I mean, in many gyms, you might have 90, 99% of people there burning out and quitting. We don't talk about them though. They just appear, they train for a bit, they have a negative experience or they burn out, they leave. No one ever thinks of them again. But the one person who does succeed and wins a world championship and doesn't get catastrophically injured before they have that glory and gets lucky enough or gets well-connected enough to be able to build a successful gym or business out of this, they stick around because they had success, right? So why wouldn't they stick around? Because they're getting the result that they want. The problem is then that people can come to think that that success is normal or expected, not realizing that it is actually tremendously rare. I really think that the future of Jiu-Jitsu is where we get to the point where we can more willingly talk about the other 90 to 99% of people who don't meet their goals in the sport. And how can we make them be successful as well? Robert Drysdale recently did an interview on BJJ Today with Andrea Tang, which is another one of our podcasts on Premium. And he talked about this. He said, you know, people are talking about how the sport is getting bigger and better. And his his stance was, is it really getting bigger or better? I mean, yeah, we can look at the very tippy-tippy top of athletes in the sport and yeah, they're probably dollar for dollar better than the athletes from 20 years ago. But if some world-class Jiu-Jitsu athlete enters a tournament and wins $100,000 and maybe a few years ago the the pot was only one-tenth of that. Okay, that's great for that one person. But does that make the sport better? Does it really make the sport better if one person is making slightly more money? I would argue that what makes the sport better is if the rest of us, if everyone else see the benefits of martial arts that were advertised to us, the quality of life benefits. Is it making us better humans? Is it getting us in shape? Is it helping us socialize, develop virtues like discipline? And if we want to make a career out of this, are we actually making money? Maybe we're not making million-dollar world championship prize pools, but are regular people able to make a career out of this? Because I think Drysdale brings up a great point that if only one or two people are seeing the rewards out of the sport, can we really say it's getting better? I think that's got to be addressed as well. We can't have a situation where the very top athletes are encountering tremendous success, but everyone else is getting left behind and ignored. Speaker 2: Yeah, oh, absolutely. Yeah. And I mean, that's that's exactly what I'm trying to do with my gym is I'm trying to create an environment and a community where anybody and everybody can see the benefits. I'm not trying to just cater to young, strong, athletic people who want to go and win competitive accolades. I'm trying to share martial arts as a vehicle for self-betterment. And if you want to go compete, awesome, right? I love rolling hard. I go compete even though I've only recently actually discovered joy in competition. The rest of my life, it's always been something that is incredibly anxiety-inducing, but I've done it anyway. But that's exactly right. Like, success should not like the sole criteria for success should not be accolades at the one out of a million level, right? If that's your criteria for success in the sport, then, you know, you just like you're setting yourself up, you're setting everybody else up around you for just abysmal failure. And so like what is success within the martial art, right? That comes back to the individual, right? What are your goals? And then how is the coach and how is the community that the coach is developing at the gym, you know, helping to like cultivate that and help people find, you know, their version of success within the martial art. Like you're talking about, you know, getting in shape, finding community, making friends, socializing, you know, developing discipline, finding resilience, comfort within discomfort, uh, which is one of the beautiful things that I really love about Jiu-Jitsu. Like those are the things that define success for me in the martial art is like all of those little things. And then, you know, how do we create a culture? How do we create a sport that allows people to be economically successful and isn't just dependent upon sales of instructionals or prize pools that are dependent upon wealthy donors. How do we, you know, make it so that you can have an economically viable career that might not be glitzy and glamorous, but allows you to live a comfortable life doing something that you really love. And I agree 100% with your synopsis there that, you know, we need to do better as the people who are kind of leaders in this sport to steer the cultural ship in a better direction. Speaker 1: When you talk about this type of burnout, it kind of makes me think of unrequited love in a way where you love someone or something and it just don't love you back. I think for many people, that's kind of the relationship they have with Jiu-Jitsu where they love it and they love the benefits that they see out of it, but they also don't feel like they're getting what they need out of the sport or they feel that everyone else is getting more out of it than they are. My coach, Emily, right? Emily Kwok, she's also a performance consultant. And I really love the way that Emily framed this. It's not that you're bad at this. It's that you're in your own category, right? Create your own category. Don't measure yourself to other people. And of course, I mean, that's easier said than done, right? We all know we shouldn't compete with the others. We should compete with ourselves. That's easier to say than to do. But I love this idea of creating a category for yourself. Because so many people in Jiu-Jitsu, they measure their performance and their progress by someone else's standard. I mean, if you are a 40-year-old hobbyist, you should expect that you're going to get your ass kicked by the 30-year-old pro athletes in the gym. You shouldn't beat yourself up over that. I mean, that that's what you want. If you as a hobbyist could roll into a Jiu-Jitsu gym and beat all of the pro athletes, that would not speak well for the effectiveness of this art, right? So, we have to understand, these paths are not better. Just because they can beat you in a roll doesn't mean that they're on a better path than you. It means that they have decided to go all in on Jiu-Jitsu, whereas you have decided to go all in on Wednesday nights to Jiu-Jitsu. And that's that's absolutely fine. It is totally cool to put a time box around your love of your hobbies and to say, hey, look, I'm going to do two nights a week of this thing. And I'm going to get as good as I can get with those two nights a week. And the people doing three and four nights a week are probably going to beat my ass. But that's fine because they're putting in more time. They're on a different path. Maybe they got into this younger. That doesn't mean that their output is better than me or that their value is greater than me. It just means that they are in a different category. And me trying to measure myself to them doesn't make sense unless I'm willing to sacrifice all of the other stuff in my life to go down the same road as them, right? I mean, it's like you brought up. If if you're a father or a mother, a husband or a wife, you're balancing this with a job, maybe multiple jobs, maybe other hobbies, maybe you got family obligations. Unless you're willing to sacrifice all of that, you shouldn't compare yourself to a pro whose only thing is Jiu-Jitsu, right? And I would actually argue that for most people, having a more balanced life is better than a life that is all about Jiu-Jitsu. My number one feedback for Jiu-Jitsu professionals is don't make it your whole identity. Don't make it your whole life because that in itself comes with a completely different set of trappings that also lead to burnout. So, I just I really think people need to understand that you can be successful in Jiu-Jitsu on your own terms. It doesn't have to be by someone else's measuring stick. Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, that is one of the core values in my gym. When I was getting ready to like actually make this thing happen, I I sat down and I worked out what is it that I really want, you know, my community and my culture and my gym to be built upon. And that is one of those core values. Like it's your path. It's your pace. Yeah. You are walking your path and you are the only one who can walk it. Everybody else is doing their own. And trying to measure yourself up against somebody else's progress on their path is pointless. You know, it's foolish. You know, unless you are trying to be like exactly that same kind of competitor or or athlete, you know, there's no point in it, right? You are here doing this thing for yourself with a group of other people who are, you know, helping you along the way. But it's ultimately it's it's it's your path. It's your expression of the hobby of, you know, if it becomes a passion. And I remember I had a very similar conversation with one of my art students. They talked about this art culture in America really sucks because you have this idea of like the starving artist. It's like either Speaker 1: I hate that. I hate that so much. Speaker 2: Right? Yeah. It's like you either make it or you don't. And it's like, well, that's insane because so much of our modern world is actually dependent upon competent artists like doing design and making beautiful art in so many roles throughout the world that, you know, if your belief of success as an artist is being like the big name that everybody knows, then yeah, absolutely. Like everybody else is going to look like a starving artist. But like, holy shit, that's not true. You know, visual art is a craft and you can be a crafts person doing visual art professionally and you can make a job of that. You don't have to be Picasso. You don't have to be, you know, this like generation-shifting savant. You can be a person who like goes to work and does good art and that's okay. Like that's that's not just valid, it's necessary. It's necessary for like a healthy functioning society. And the same thing is true for martial arts. You don't have to be Roger Gracie, right? There's only going to be one. But the martial arts world, Jiu-Jitsu needs those people who are coming in to train. They need people who are, you know, community coaches. They need people who are really good at teaching kids class. It needs all of those kinds of people to actually like make the community healthy and thriving and able to grow in a healthy way. So much more than just like being a phenom who can go and, you know, trounce everybody at ADCC. Speaker 1: Yeah, very, very well said. I love that idea of kind of finding your thing. That's something that people in Jiu-Jitsu often struggle with because again, since this is a one-on-one competitive sport, it's so easy to just compare ourselves to other people and to put everyone on the same hierarchy and the same track. But a lesson that I took from the business world is, look, there's different ways to become number one. You can either try to become number one by running someone else's race and playing their game and just try to outcompete, outperform everyone there, or you can invent your own track, right? You can come up with some unique combination of things that stand out and just by definition, by virtue of the fact that no one else has done this before, you're immediately number one in that space. I mean, an example, let's give an example here, right? BJJ Fanatics. From a technical standpoint, there is absolutely nothing remarkable about BJJ Fanatics, right? In fact, it's probably actually not nearly as good as a lot of other video platforms out there. If you were to just take it and measure it as a video platform, not that great, right? But by finding this intersection of a video platform that also caters directly to Jiu-Jitsu, right? By finding this niche, now suddenly it's number one in a new field because no one else had really attempted that before, at least not to the level of success or scale that they had. And I see this a lot now with new coaching ideas that come up, right? Sometimes it's not that people are putting out ideas that are just trying to outcompete other people. Sometimes it's coming up with something new or novel that stands out, that's different, right? That's marketed in a different way or positioned in a different way. It's often easier to compete by creating a new track than it is by trying to beat other people at their own game, unless you just happen to be a an unbelievable savant in that space, right? But I mean, you, for example, coming from my background as a as a tech person, right? There are some people who are just incredibly world-class at things like software engineering. And no matter how good you or I are, no matter how hard we work, we'll just never be as good at it as those people are. But we can still actually outperform those people if we have a better clarity of vision than they do about where we want to apply that work. If we can come up with a a new synthesis of ideas or a new way of positioning something or a new way to to approach a problem that hasn't been done before, or maybe we identify a problem that people didn't even know was there, then we're just right out of the gate, we're number one in that space. We have the first mover advantage because no one else has done it before. And you don't have to be the best to make something like that happen. I mean, there's a lot of incredible Jiu-Jitsu instructionals and platforms out there. There's a lot of stuff that you can grab now where the creator is not necessarily the best in the world, but they're so good at their particular way of presenting information that they've found a home, right? I mean, a lot of the biggest influencers, a lot of the most appreciated influencers in the sport of Jiu-Jitsu were not the number one competitor, but just they have a way of presenting or distributing information that's new. That's valuable, right? And so again, I think that one solution to burnout, often if you feel burnout, if you feel like you're in an unwinnable battle, it might be because you're measuring your performance on the wrong track and maybe you need to get off that track, right? That's again, where, God, if you're in a job where it just feels like you're you're just grinding away for someone else's benefit and you're not getting anything out of it, that to me is a moment where maybe you need to take a weekend off and just go and sit in isolation for a bit and really think and figure out what could I be doing with my time that would add more fulfillment to my life, but also add more value to the world as well. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, framing it as a problem to solve really resonates with me because that's kind of what I feel like I am, you know, at the core. I'm a problem solver, right? All of the success that I had in my professional tech career wasn't because I was like a genius in data or I was a, you know, genius in any one of these things, but it was my ability to like look at and structure the problem in ways that other people hadn't been and just asking the question, what's this for, right? That was a question that got drilled into us when I was in art school. Whatever you're doing art, especially production art for a client, you always have to ask, what's this for? WTF. What's this for? There is a problem that you're trying to solve. What is that actual problem and what are some ways that you can try and solve that? And there are ways that exist and you can follow paths that other people have. But the reality is is that most people haven't actually solved most problems in like the most effective or most efficient ways, you know, especially as like new technologies and information is just more readily available or or distributed or democratized. There is a lot of opportunity for novel solutions to common problems and that is absolutely true within Jiu-Jitsu, right? The like how do you, you know, teach or how do you communicate? I mean, you, Steve, running BJJ Mental Models, you are also one of those people, right? You are doing something that people really hadn't been doing. And so, hey, you're like first out the gate there and you were able to make a name because of that. I'm doing something that the community sorely needed and still sorely needs, you know, having a more deliberate, structured, intellectual approach to Jiu-Jitsu and martial arts and all of the various aspects of it, you know, from like like the athletics to the business to the competition and all of that. And going back to that like solving the problem. What is the problem? That's not always an easy question for people to answer. It takes practice. Like you have to be able to sit and like you said, you know, maybe it takes a weekend away. Get away from things and sit with this question. What is this for? What is this problem? What am I actually trying to do? Why am I doing this? It's a level of introspection that doesn't come naturally to a lot of people, but it's a skill that you can develop and you can practice and the more that you do that and the more that you actually ask those questions and try and solve them either for yourself or for those people that you're serving, the better and better you get at asking the question and solving it again in the future. And, you know, you become maybe not number one, right? You don't always have to be number one. You can just be the person who solves that problem for the people in your community and that's valuable, right? There are people in this neighborhood in Seattle who are interested in Jiu-Jitsu, kids who are interested in martial arts, who they need somebody who's able to come in and do this. And right, am I making an impact? Am I like making waves throughout the world? Well, probably not, but I'm making a positive impact within my community and that feels as meaningful to me as anything else I could do in my life. Speaker 1: Well, for people who are maybe at the beginning or unfortunately, maybe further along in this burnout journey, what are some of the warning signs that you've experienced? How do you know if you're unfortunately going down the path to burnout and this is something that you need to start thinking about so that you can remedy it sooner rather than later? Speaker 2: Well, for me, the signs have always been like what does my personal life look like? And not just, you know, personal life as in like relationships or ability to do hobbies, but like, how am I taking care of myself, right? Am I putting my laundry away when I do it? Am I washing my dishes? Am I vacuuming? Am I like showering regularly enough? Like how's how's my hygiene doing? You know, checking in on myself. How's my sleep? Am I sleeping too much? Am I not sleeping enough? What's my diet like? You know, am I eating my feelings? Am I drinking too much? Am I, you know, smoking my problems away? There are a lot of little signs that can pop up as your brain is looking for ways to cope with stress and either chemical imbalance like lacking whatever dopamine or serotonin or just trying to deal with the flood of cortisol that you're like just just struggling against 24/7 without necessarily realizing it. So for me, that has turned out to be the best indicator is like, well, let's take a look around in my like current living situation. How am I doing? You know what? I'm kind of struggling right now. What can I do differently? What maybe am I struggling with and are there things that I can like unburden myself with? Do I need to ask for help? That for me has been like the biggest thing is being able to recognize when I need to ask for help and then actually being able to ask for help. It's not easy, right? You know, American culture is very like individual, right? You are the captain of your ship and you have to be able to like pull yourself up by your bootstraps and like do this. And if you work hard enough, you can accomplish whatever you want. And, you know, the toxic side of that is, well, is it bad if I need help, right? You know, and sometimes it's okay to ask for help. A lot of times it's okay to ask for help. I mean, we're social animals. Like we are where we are in this world today because we have done a lot of work together, right? I mean, even Jiu-Jitsu, it's an individual sport of like me versus this other person, but it's also wholly dependent upon other people in the gym training with me. And so, you know, just being able to like assess, just sit down and take a look and like what what am I feeling? How am I doing? And what can I do differently? What needs to be done differently? What am I trying to accomplish? And is it important? Is it urgent? Is it something that I need to do right now or is it something that can be set to the side? You know, my son was born, he's going to be three soon and I got my brown belt like two months after he was born. And, you know, I know that I'm doing Jiu-Jitsu until I physically cannot. So, you know, the question of like training has always I've always been able to fall back to that. Well, it's like, I'm going to just train no matter what. But I really struggled because I was just not sleeping. I was I was a new dad and, you know, I had new responsibilities and balancing like this life as a new dad and trying to do martial arts seriously because I consider myself a martial artist was fucking impossible. And the first place that I went to in that, you know, stress-ridden state was self-flagellation. Like, I'm not a good enough dad. I'm not a good enough martial artist. I'm not good enough because I can't get myself to do all of these things that I believe that I should be able to do. My partner to live gave me a great quote that I always use for myself, which is don't should on yourself, right? You should be able to do this. Well, why, right? Maybe right now or at that time, I don't need to train as much as I should. Maybe twice a week is fine. Maybe once a week is fine, right? Get in when I can. I'm a dad. That's way fucking more important. Like being a good dad, making sure that I'm doing good at work so I can, you know, have food on the table and pay the bills, making sure that I'm present for my son, making sure that I'm present for my partner. Like that's the stuff that's actually important. Like, yes, martial arts is important. I love it. Obviously, right? But I had to sit down and I had to face that like that attack on my identity as a martial artist, right? If I'm not doing it enough, am I actually really a martial artist or am I just totally a fraud? It's like, well, no, I'm I'm a martial artist. I just can't train as much right now and that's okay, right? But that wasn't an easy conclusion for me to come to because I was sleep deprived and I was stressed. But, you know, being able to sit down and go back to that assessment. How am I doing? What am I feeling? What am I struggling with? And then how do I solve that problem? Yeah, I can definitely relate to that. I mean, as a father myself, my life priorities changed dramatically when my kid was born and I went through a similar crisis of confidence where my training had dropped significantly, especially as other obligations in life started taking up more space and my priorities changed. Life gets more complicated as you get older. You often have more responsibilities and your attention needs to be split more carefully among things. And it's very easy to get into this position where you're just burning yourself out by trying to do too much at once. And when you start scaling back on these things and trying to reclaim your life, often the person who's going to be hardest on you is you because you feel like, man, can I still call myself a martial artist anymore if I'm not training like crazy? And I got to the point where I realized, you know what, fuck you if you're going to tell me what kind of martial artist I should be. I'm going to be the kind of martial artist I want to be. I don't need some other random idiot that I don't even care about to tell me how to do things. I think that learning to let go of what other people think about you is a big part of maturity and growth. And what you often find when you do that is most of those perceptions you had are completely internal. It's your fear of how you think other people would perceive you. It's not how other people actually perceive you. It is your feeling of personally feeling embarrassed or feeling less than because of how you think other people would perceive you. And often that perception either doesn't match with reality or it just simply doesn't matter because fuck what they think anyway. Speaker 1: Yeah, right. Most people don't give a shit about you, right? That's just true. You know, a handful of people care about you in your life, but most people that you could ever encounter in the entire length of your life don't give a shit. And it's not because they're heartless or careless. It's because they have their own lives. They have their own complexities that they deal with. And casting judgment on you for trying to live your own life is just not even like on their radar. Like why would they even take the time to do that? I don't care, you're living your life, whatever, right? But that is hard because if you are a self-critical person, letting go of that idea can be really challenging. But absolutely, that's, you know, you have to be able to do that. You have to be able to just say like, well, do I actually care what they think? What's the kind of person that's actually going to judge me for making a decision for my health? And do I actually give a shit what that kind of person has to say or think about me? Not really. It makes me want to expand on this here. Um, something that I would also want to point out is the kind of person who does really care about what you're doing and whether you specifically are good enough is probably the kind of person whose opinion is garbage anyway, right? It's not the sign of a well-rounded individual that they're super obsessed with whether someone else is good enough at whatever. So in the event that someone actually is up your ass about this and is giving you grief about not being good enough, that really is a reflection of them. That's a reflection that what they believe probably isn't worth occupying space in your head. So that's a little reframing trick that I've learned, right? To when you get that kind of energy to understand that, oh, this is a sign that this is a person whose opinion doesn't matter, right? Because the kind of person who is just completely obsessed with what other people are doing and whether they're good enough, fuck those people. Their opinion is that's the last person to take advice from. Speaker 2: Yeah, oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Speaker 1: Well, excellent, Jesse. I'm glad we had this chat. But man, if people are in your area, if they're in the Seattle area and they like what you're you're saying here and they want to learn from you directly and maybe see the approach that you apply at your gym, let's plug this. Where can people find you? Speaker 2: Yeah, Gentle Giant Jiu-Jitsu. I'm in Madrona, so I'm, uh, you know, outside of the downtown Seattle area, east right off of Lake Washington. Uh, you know, cute little neighborhood. Small gym right now, humble beginnings, you know, but I've got a solid crew that's slowly building up. My kids program is really blowing up. I've got a great, you know, great location for the kids program. But I'm getting, you know, adults, new and old students, you know, people who've been training for a long time at other places who are, you know, making the decision to make this their home gym. And I love visitors. I'm totally open to anybody and everybody who wants to come in, you know, new and experienced. I try my best to cater to anybody who comes through the doors. I'm a big guy, right? There's the name Gentle Giant and I I like to roll with whoever I can and, you know, and I try and, you know, match whatever the intensity is, you know, so if you like to come in and do hard rounds, I like to do hard rounds too. Uh, if you want to come in and just flow and you just want to learn, well, yeah, let's do that too. So, yeah, you can find me on Instagram, Gentle Giant Jiu-Jitsu. I've got a website, g-g-j-j.com. It's work in progress, right? My gym has been open only for a few months, but, you know, it's off to a really solid start, you know, better than I had aggressive projections in my business plan and I'm doing even better than I had projected, um, which I feel just unbelievably lucky. But I also have to recognize that I've put in a lot of hard work, but, you know, luck is a big component and I just feel I feel, you know, hashtag blessed to be able to do what I'm doing. Speaker 1: Well, we have a lot of mutuals and like I said, there's a lot of people that I know who I trust and respect very much who have said amazing things about you. So I definitely want to encourage people if they're in the Seattle area to come check out the gym. I will put links to your Instagram and your gym page in the show notes to make it easy for people to find. So just pop open your podcast player, should be one tap away to get access to Jesse and his gym. I'll also put a link to our stuff. You can go to BJJmentalmodels.com for everything we make. The majority of stuff like this, the podcast, our full-length episodes, mini episodes and our newsletter, they're all completely free. So there's no reason not to sign up and grab all of that. We have been one of the most long-running educational focused Jiu-Jitsu podcasts. This has been going on for years and years and years now, getting close to, man, 400 episodes, believe it or not. And we've always tried to do something a little bit different, right? We've always tried to focus on being educational. Hopefully this episode has delivered on on that as well. If you want to dig deeper with us, that's what BJJ Mental Models Premium is for. That's the world's largest library of Jiu-Jitsu audio classes. If you love this particular vehicle of learning Jiu-Jitsu and you want to focus on the the concepts, the philosophical side, mindset, strategy, that's really where we shine. Our library is always growing and there's a ton of stuff beyond the courses as well that would make you want to sign up. I could go through the whole pitch, but you know what, the first week is free, so you can just go to BJJmentalmodels.com. Check it out yourself, see what's there and if you don't like it, you can always bail and you won't be charged a cent if you cancel within the first week. Although, if you're like the hundreds of other people who haven't canceled, then hopefully you will find the same value there that they did. Um, but again, BJJmentalmodels.com for everything we make. Jesse, man, thanks so much for coming by. This is a great chat. A topic that's obviously very near and dear to my heart. Um, I know that every time we do an episode on burnout, it resonates with a lot of people. So, love hearing your story, man, and I hope this gives a lot of value to the listeners as well. Speaker 2: Yeah, I hope so too. Thanks, Steve. It was a really great chat. Thanks for having me on. Speaker 1: Most welcome, my friend. Thank you to the listeners as well and we will talk to you in the next episode. We will see you then.