Mini Ep. 64: Resulting

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 in this week's mini episode, I want to talk about a logical fallacy called resulting. I first learned about resulting in Annie Duke's book Thinking in Bets, but my Jiu-Jitsu coach, Emily Kwok, has also talked about this as well. Resulting is when you get the decisions that you made and the results that you got confused. You think that they're related even though they might not be entirely related. So here's a relevant example. The winner of UFC 3 was a ninja, a man named Steve Jennum. He was an alternate in the tournament. He wasn't even in the tournament originally. His recorded record was 0-0-0 going into that tournament, but he won. And we can say that at UFC 3, Steve Jennum, a ninja, became UFC champion. Now, does that mean that Ninjutsu is a great base for MMA? No. The reason he became champion was because Ken Shamrock made it to the finals, had to withdraw due to an injury. Steve Jennum, the ninja, was an alternate, so he got the spot and he managed to win. So this is an example of doing things wrong but still getting the result that you wanted anyway. Now, in that scenario, if you were Steve Jennum, you might think, I am amazing. I am the best combat athlete in the world. That would be resulting. This is a perfect example of where someone did not make the best decisions, but they wound up getting good results anyway. And of course, the opposite can also happen where someone makes great decisions and they don't get the results that they want. And if you don't think critically about these situations, they can lead to further poor decisions because you might throw out perfectly good ideas or stick to bad ones. In Jiu-Jitsu, people often evaluate the quality of their training based on the results that they got in competition. It's common to assume that if you won a competition, this must have meant that your training was great and your Jiu-Jitsu was great. Or the flip side being if you lost, you might assume the opposite, that your training was poor and your Jiu-Jitsu was poor. This is not always the case. There are aspects of chance involved in tournaments. Sometimes you win or lose for reasons that are not your fault. That's just part of the game, and that's part of why we encourage people, if you want to be a performance competitor, you need to compete frequently because any individual competition in isolation, there's an aspect of chance. It might not accurately reflect the true quality of your Jiu-Jitsu. However, if you fall prey to the resulting fallacy, you might come out of a tournament and win and think that means that your Jiu-Jitsu is fantastic and there's nothing that you need to change. And then you can have a rude awakening in the next tournament where you realize that actually maybe that that good result I got earlier, maybe there was an aspect of chance involved there that really didn't have anything to do with how good my Jiu-Jitsu is. This also comes up a lot in the training room where people evaluate the quality of their Jiu-Jitsu based on whether they're tapping people in the gym. This is a terrible metric for deciding whether you're good at Jiu-Jitsu. Um, first of all, because your goal in the gym should be to learn, not to win, but also, if you're focused on winning in the gym and everyone around you is focused on learning, you might get a lot of false positives where you're getting a lot of taps in the gym, and you could think that that's because you're awesome, but it might simply be that the other people are focused on skill acquisition and not artificial victories. So, it is a huge problem where people come up through the early ranks of Jiu-Jitsu thinking they're great because they're getting a lot of wins in the gym or even in local regional tournaments, but once they start competing against better grapplers, more experienced grapplers, they realize that they weren't as good as they thought they were. And it's not uncommon for people who got off to a hot start in Jiu-Jitsu to eventually get passed by other people. That can happen because of resulting, when you think you're better than you actually are because you're measuring your skill in only wins and losses. Now, that is not to say that wins and losses don't matter. Wins and losses are an important objective metric for determining the quality of your grappling, but at any given point in time, in any given match, someone can win and someone can lose. There is an aspect of chance, as Steve Jennum illustrates. The way that we get good data is by competing or testing ourselves frequently, and that helps smooth over any of those outliers where maybe you had a good result that you shouldn't have got or a bad result that you shouldn't have got. When you are measuring the quality of your Jiu-Jitsu based only on wins and losses, that is the resulting fallacy. And I'm sure you can think of parallels to the rest of the real life as well, where people measure their intelligence or their hard work based on how much money they might have. Wealth is not a great metric to determine how hard a worker someone is or how skilled they are. There are many reasons why someone might be wealthy beyond their skill, their hard work, or any action that they took. In Jiu-Jitsu, I encourage people to keep the resulting fallacy in the back of their head at all times. Whenever you're thinking you're great because you got a good result, or you're thinking you're terrible because you didn't, always remember that the resulting fallacy could be accounting for that feeling. Get some more data. Don't just throw out a game plan because it didn't work one time. Maybe pressure test it a little bit more. It could be that that one time it failed was just an outlier. And similarly, don't assume that you're amazing because you won. It's possible to win at Jiu-Jitsu even if you did everything wrong. If a ninja can win a UFC championship, that tells us that on any given day, anyone can win and anyone can lose, and the quality of your decisions and the quality of your results are not always related. That's the resulting fallacy. Please keep this in mind in the back of your head when you're training. It's the perfect example of the things that we talk about here on BJJ Mental Models, a concept that's useful both inside and outside of Jiu-Jitsu. We've got a ton of mini episodes like this. If you want more of them, go to BJJmentalmodels.com. And if you want a more formal relationship with us and access to the world's largest library of Jiu-Jitsu audio courses on strategy, tactics, concept, and mindset, think Audible and Masterclass for Jiu-Jitsu. That's BJJ Mental Models Premium. You can get all of that at BJJmentalmodels.com. Thanks so much for listening to this mini episode, and I'll talk to you in the next one.