Mini Ep. 78: Last Mile Problem

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. And I am going to use this mini episode to talk about a concept called the last mile problem. I have discussed this recently on a few episodes of our podcast and of course in our premium series, and one of our subscribers asked me to expand upon that in a mini episode. So, the last mile problem is the tendency to fail at the last mile of a journey when it looked like everything was going well. This can manifest in a few ways. Think of the old fable of the tortoise and the hare. In the context of Jiu-Jitsu, when people are winning a match and then it falls apart at the end, that could be the last mile problem. The term originates from the world of shipping and logistics, and it refers to how if I'm sending a package, the last mile of that transport is the hardest part. So, as an example, if I live in New York and you live in Toronto, me getting the package from New York to Toronto is not that difficult. But once it arrives in Toronto, the last mile of the delivery to get it to your destination, that's the hardest part of the journey. And that's why what Amazon has been able to do where you can do same-day delivery to your house is so revolutionary. It's because that's so hard. The last mile problem is very relevant to Jiu-Jitsu because it teaches us about how things can go wrong when we're near completion of our goals. It can happen for four common reasons, and I'm going to run through those here. So the four reasons why the last mile problem can occur, number one, complexity, number two, complacency, number three, consistency, and number four, confidence. Again, that's complexity, complacency, consistency, and confidence. Let's run through what we mean by each of these. So, complexity is a common cause of the last mile problem. This goes back to that shipping example I brought. It's just really hard and really complex to get something to the end of its journey, especially if that journey is very, very specific and unusual. So taking it back to the world of transport, if I'm trying to ship a package to you, if I'm sending it from New York to Toronto, the trade routes and the transport routes to get a package from one of those cities to the other, those are well-established. There's a lot of traffic that goes through those trade routes. It's a solved problem. So, that isn't hard. But if I then want to get that package from Toronto to your house, if you live in that city, there is so much variability there. Where it gets to is you need to have a driver go right to your house and drop that thing off. And when you consider that there are many other people making similar deliveries, that's a lot of very unique destinations that the driver must deliver things to. And that's what makes the last mile of transportation complex because there's variability at the end. And this can happen in Jiu-Jitsu as well. The more unique and specific your goals, the more likely you're going to hit a last mile problem because by definition, you're going off the beaten path. You're doing something that is not commonly done. And that means you're going to have to be a bit of a trailblazer. It's hard to build off of existing solutions or learn from the successes of other people if very few people have attempted to do what you're doing before. So if you want to be a Jiu-Jitsu champion or an elite world-class Jiu-Jitsu champion, you're heading into territory that is not commonly shared, and your journey is going to be unique. So, that's why in my mind, it's not that difficult to get to a brown or a black belt in Jiu-Jitsu because that's something that is a pretty well-defined path. But if you want to start carving off competition success, a big part of that then becomes what does your specific path to the top of the podium look like? And that can get very unique, hard to reproduce. It's hard to find a playbook that will teach you how to get from I'm a great grappler to I'm a championship grappler. And that's part of where complexity becomes a problem and where the last mile can cause issues. So the second reason the last mile problem can occur is complacency. And this is the tortoise and hare situation. It's where you get comfortable. You think that victory is inevitable. You can see the light at the end of the tunnel, and so you take your foot off the gas. You think to yourself, well, look, I've got this thing in the bag. I've earned a break, haven't I? I'm going to take that break. I deserve it. And hey, statistically speaking, you might be right. Maybe there is a really good chance that you're going to win this thing. But we see a lot of people who take their foot off the gas at the last mile, and then they wind up snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. I did an interview with a professional card gamer, Wesley Seek, who goes by the handle Lamby Series, and he had this thesis that luck is something that you can create. And he talked about how like, look, if you are at the losing end of a match, there's two ways that you can look at this. You can say, hey, I'm down on points. I'm in a bad position. Maybe I've got a 90% chance of losing. If you look at it that way, you might be inclined to give up. But if you flip that around, you could also think to yourself, hey, I've got a 10% chance of winning. Are those amazing odds? No, but 10% is pretty good, right? I mean, if I told you you had a 10% chance of becoming a Jiu-Jitsu world champion, you would probably think those are higher odds than you would expect. So rather than giving up when you're in a bad situation, if you turn up the grit and you turn up the desire to win, that can be enough to sometimes reclaim your victory even if you were losing badly, especially if the other person gets complacent. So complacency is a natural problem that comes up in really any competitive endeavor, and Jiu-Jitsu competition is no exception there. The solution here is to really be strategic when you're ahead in a match. You're going to have to decide is being conservative and trying to hold my gains the best strategy, or should I try to close this out and finish it? Because if you close out and you finish the match, then you win, right? But as long as your opponent is still in the fight, even if you're up on points and you're in a better position, it's still possible that they could win. And so you have to decide, is it worth trying to finish this thing in order to close out any possibility of my opponent winning, or is it better to play conservatively, maybe a bit complacently, and try to get to the end of the clock and just take this on points, right? There's a risk to doing that because although statistically speaking it can run in your favor, you are also leaving the door open for your opponent to come back. So that's just a decision that you have to make. The third reason that the last mile problem can occur is consistency. For many different types of journeys, your success is not linear or easily measurable. And if you're not seeing the kinds of results that you want to see on a regular, measurable basis, it could get easy to give up because it feels like you're not achieving anything. So often times when people quit, they might have been almost at the achievement of their goals, but they didn't see that. And so they abandoned those goals because they didn't think they were ever going to get there, but they might have been super close. An example that I like to talk about is Adam Wozinski, who lost worlds over a 10-year period and finally won. It took him 10 years to achieve his goal. 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, he lost. 2020, there was no worlds. 2021, 2022, 2023, he loses again. And then in 2024, he wins worlds, four fights, four submissions. And I mean, that was a huge defining moment for him. And if you were to just look at his results, you would not see this linear achievement path. It really looks like he was struggling for a long time and then everything clicked together. That's kind of the nature of how compound gains work. Sometimes you don't see big gains over time, but if you keep at it, eventually you cross this threshold where you start getting critical mass and momentum, and then everything becomes easier. So, if you've ever heard people jokingly say something like, I'm a 14-year overnight success, this is what they're talking about. It takes time to get to the point where you start seeing measurable results, and that's why consistency matters. If you give up just because you're not seeing results today, you may have no idea how close you were to actually achieving your goals. You could have been just a few months away. And the fourth and final common reason why people encounter the last mile problem is confidence. There's a few reasons this can happen. One is self-sabotage. If you lack a sense of self-worth, maybe you feel like you don't deserve your accomplishments, and so that can lead you to shy away from them. Also, it can be a fear of embarrassment or humiliation. If you're afraid of choking in a match, that can lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy where you choke. So, this is a consideration as well. So confidence can become a barrier where the closer you get to the goals, the more you struggle because now eyeballs are on you and you're so close and the stakes feel higher. If you are struggling with the last mile problem because of confidence, don't be afraid to ask for help from a psychiatrist, a therapist, or a mental coach. Which of those is the best option for you is going to depend on your specific problem, which is why I suggest you talk to one of those specialists because they might be able to help direct you to the best person to help. Um this is a common issue, and it is one that sometimes is easier to solve when you have the help of a professional. So if you feel a sense of lacking self-worth or if you feel like embarrassment or humiliation could be things that lead you to choke, then these are times when you might want to seek a psychiatrist, a therapist, or a mental coach because those might be people who can help you overcome those issues. So, there's an explanation of the last mile problem. The four common problems we talked about that can lead to the last mile problem are complexity, complacency, consistency, and confidence. Hopefully, you found this to be useful. If you want more like this, go to BJJmentalmodels.com. Our mini episodes, our full-length podcast episodes, and our newsletter are all completely free. And if you want more with us, level up with us at BJJ Mental Models Premium. It is the world's largest and in my opinion, most valuable library of audio lessons for Jiu-Jitsu. If you love Audible and Masterclass, if you love this kind of mental model talk, systems thinking concepts, strategy, tactics, this sort of stuff doesn't get taught a lot, but we specialize in it. You can get all of that at BJJ Mental Models Premium. That plus the stuff I mentioned earlier is at BJJmentalmodels.com. I'll put a link in the show notes, but thank you so much for listening. I hope you got value out of this and I'll talk to you in the next episode.