Mini Ep. 62: The Red Queen Effect

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 tackle one of the most common challenges that people bring up in jiu-jitsu, which is, why doesn't it feel like I'm getting better? We have all gone through what I guess in jiu-jitsu we would call a plateau, this feeling that we're just not improving at all. And often that feeling is an illusion. Now, a big part of why we feel we're not getting better is because we're erroneously comparing ourselves to others, to the people around us. And I can spend, and probably will spend a whole separate mini episode on that topic, just our tendency to compare ourselves to others and why that's not the right way to gauge your performance. But today I want to talk about the perception of this. Why does it feel like we're not getting better even when we are? So, there's a mental model called the Red Queen Effect, which explains this particular phenomenon. This is a reference to Alice in Wonderland, and I'm going to go literate here on you for a second. So, reading a quote from Alice in Wonderland, the Red Queen once said, "Now, here you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that." Um, and this section from Alice in Wonderland has been cited and actually turned into a theory about performance and just our need to improve. Interestingly, this is actually a theory that appears in science. It's a hypothesis in evolutionary biology, which proposes that animals have to keep evolving to survive. If you don't evolve, meaning if you stay in the same place, then by definition you're falling behind. You have to run just to keep your spot, just to keep in the same place. This is also a tremendously common problem when it comes to how we store and manage our money. If you just park your money in a savings account, it might feel like, hey, I've I've de-risked my money here. Uh, I'm not going to lose any money at least because I'm not doing something dangerous. I'm not gambling with the stock market. The reality though, is that because of inflation, if you just park your money in the same place, it loses value. So, yes, putting your money in the stock market has risk, but it's much more risky to do nothing with your money because then it will definitely lose value as long as the economy keeps growing and inflation keeps happening. So the lesson here is that staying in the same place is a bad idea. To get better, you need to move forward. That's what the Red Queen Effect teaches us. And the reason this matters is because when you're training jiu-jitsu, understand that everyone else in the gym is moving forward as well. They're all getting better. And so if you are looking to your training partners as a benchmark for your progress, what you're likely going to find is it never feels like you're getting better because you're all staying lockstep in line with each other. As you get better, they get better. So when you compare yourselves to them in terms of the outcome of your rolling experience with them, what you'll probably find is it doesn't change that much because everyone's getting better together. Something that my old instructor used to tell me is that jiu-jitsu is like an elevator. When we train together, we all get on the elevator, we're all getting better, we go up together in that elevator. And so when you look at other people in the elevator, it doesn't feel like you're getting better because you guys are all moving up at the same time. It looks like you're all stationary, even though the elevator is actually going up. But if you want to see what your progress really looks like, you measure yourself against the person who gets off the elevator for a bit. So, you've probably had this happen where maybe one of your training partners has had a layoff, either they focused on their real life for a while and so they cut back or stopped training, or perhaps they were injured or life circumstances required them to take off for a while. And then when they come back, suddenly you've leapfrogged them. I certainly had this experience. When I was a beginner at jiu-jitsu, there was a blue belt I used to train with who just he dominated me. I had just really had no chance against him. And then he took many years off. And when he came back, I was a brown belt, and it was not the same roll. He was shocked at how different it was rolling with me versus then, right? All of a sudden, I had leapfrogged him, and that's because he got off the elevator. I was still moving while he had stopped. And as a result, because he stopped, he fell behind. So this is kind of an example of relativity. When you're getting better, if the people around you are also getting better, it's not really effective to compare yourselves to them because you're all improving. It's really only once someone takes off that you're going to start to see the difference. So the takeaway here is that because of the Red Queen Effect, this feeling of I'm not getting better at jiu-jitsu, it's an illusion. And the best way to really assess whether you're getting better is through a more objective measurement where you compare against yourself. And again, that whole topic is probably best suited in a different mini episode. So I'm going to park it here today. At least hopefully this knowledge of the Red Queen Effect gives you some ammunition to better understand why maybe sometimes it doesn't feel like we're improving at jiu-jitsu even though we are. If you want more like this, go to BJJmentalmodels.com. We've got hundreds of episodes of our full-length podcast that discuss topics like this in much more detail with amazing guests, and we also have tons of mini episodes just like this if you want to get to the point and hear the mental models faster. Again, all of that plus our amazing newsletter is at BJJmentalmodels.com. It's all free, so please sign up if you haven't already. And where we really want you to go is BJJ Mental Models Premium. That is our marquee service where we really help you get better at jiu-jitsu and improve the quality of your grappling across the board, not just in terms of individual performance, but also in terms of mindset and how you socialize with the community at large. BJJ Mental Models Premium is our best solution for doing that. We've got hundreds of hours of content plus premium podcasts there that specifically target how to be a better grappler. Again, BJJmentalmodels.com is where the free stuff and premium lives, so please do check that out. Link in the show notes. Thanks as always for listening and I'll talk to you soon.