Mini Ep. 61: Systematic Abandonment

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 bring in a concept that's really prevalent in the business world and show how it actually relates very closely to jiu-jitsu as well. So this concept is often called systematic abandonment, and is frequently attributed to the legendary business consultant Peter Drucker. A quote that he once said is, "The first step in a growth policy is not to decide where and how to grow. It is to decide what to abandon. In order to grow, a business must have a systematic policy to get rid of the outgrown, the obsolete, the unproductive." This was also said in different words by Michael Porter, another legendary business strategist who specializes in the study of competitive strategy. Something that he once said is, "The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do." There's a fundamental distinction between strategy and operational effectiveness. Strategy is about making choices, trade-offs, it's about deliberately choosing to be different. So, this might sound like it's a little bit out there, but one of the things I love about mental model thinking is it allows us to find patterns that apply at a more general sense across different fields. And ultimately, when we talk about how we succeed at jiu-jitsu, a big part of that is decision-making. How do we know that we're doing the right thing? And I can't think of many more high-pressure decision-making environments than a Brazilian jiu-jitsu match. You have only a split second to make the right decision, and if you make the wrong one, the consequences are very dire. So, some of the lessons that come from the business world where the art of decision-making has been very closely studied, can actually be really useful in jiu-jitsu as well. And systematic abandonment, this idea of choosing what to get rid of and what not to do, turns out to be super important if you want to get good at jiu-jitsu over the long term. And I'll explain why. The general idea behind systematic abandonment is what got you here won't get you there. Ultimately, to get better over time, you might have to stop doing some of the things or discard some of the habits that got you to where you are in the first place. And this can feel kind of counterintuitive because, you know, you've probably heard the old saying, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Well, that can be kind of true, but taking that approach can also be dangerous because if you believe you shouldn't have to change anything, then you're probably not going to grow and get better. I'll give an example of how this applied in my jiu-jitsu game. When I was a blue belt, I used to have a really good triangle choke setup that I just loved. I'll spare the technical details, but basically it involved, um, using a lot of force to clip my opponent, force them off balance into a 90-degree angle, and from there I could just snatch on the triangle. And I had a lot of success with that at blue belt. Unfortunately, that approach really fell apart as I started dealing with purple, brown, and black belts. And the reason why is because once you get up to the more senior belts, their alignment is really good. Their body positioning is solid. It's unlikely that you're going to be able to just clip someone hard enough to off-balance them and lock in a triangle. You need to have a much more controlled setup. If your setup is loose and wild like mine was, it's unlikely to catch anyone good. You'll also notice that there's a lot of other tricks that we often teach beginners that you kind of outgrow. So a common example is when you are on bottom mount, you will be told, probably, when you are a beginner, don't put your arm straight up, right? And the reason you're told that is because we want to discourage people from doing a bench press. We we feel like, okay, if we teach our beginners to stick their arms up in the air when they're being mounted, they're giving up an easy arm bar. And that's maybe good advice for a beginner. However, once you get up to a more seasoned level, you realize, well, in some cases, you actually can bench press your opponent off of you, as long as you can do so in such a way that your arms aren't exposed to the arm bar, it's totally fine to do. Um, the kipping escape, a very powerful mount escape, is kind of an example of a modified scenario where you do stick your arms up. You're just doing so in a way that's safe. So, you have to discard some of that white belt thinking as you get better at jiu-jitsu. Some of the basic lessons that you learn at the beginning, you realize as you get more experienced, they were really just guidelines to kind of keep you from making big obvious mistakes when you were getting started. Another very common piece of advice that we give to beginners is when you're being mounted, put your hands up by your face to block the cross choke. That's not terrible advice for beginners if your main concern is getting choked. But as you get better at jiu-jitsu, you realize if you just keep your hands there in that home alone position where you've got your your palms up by your cheeks, the problem is, although you may be blocking a cross choke, you're not really doing anything productive with your hands to get out of that situation. So, you're maybe denying the cross choke, but you're also stuck in a position that's going to be very hard to get out of, and over time, a good opponent will use the power of the mount to find something. And if this is a rule set where strikes are involved, you're just going to get teed off on right in the face. So, this is another piece of advice that beginners sometimes hear, which you outgrow pretty quickly. So I always encourage people to do a periodic analysis of what you're doing and think about whether it's still serving you well. Is it still getting you results like it used to, or has it kind of tapered off because the quality of your opponents has gotten better? In the business world, the way that you would apply systematic abandonment is, every once in a while, let's say every year, you might sit down and do an audit of all of the things you're doing on a daily basis. And if there's stuff that you're doing that really just eats up time but doesn't add value, you get rid of it, you chop it out. This is also a good practice to do in your personal life if you want to really maximize the time during the day. We often accumulate habits, you know, we talk on this podcast all the time about the power of good habits, but not all habits are good. Sometimes you've accumulated habits that just waste time, or maybe they used to help you a lot, but over time they've become less useful. Where I find this happens to me a lot is with different types of journaling. I have a whole bunch of apps and processes I use for keeping track of stuff, and I always get so excited when I find a new way to, you know, log my meals. But sometimes I find after about a year of doing it that it's really not adding value anymore. It's just eating up more time in my day. And so I will systematically abandon some of those habits that aren't working for me anymore. Back to the business world. I mean, if you work in corporate, how many times have you been in a meeting and just thought, man, this is just such a waste of time. And, you know, if you had a time machine and you went back in time a year or two, maybe those meetings were super productive then, but that doesn't mean they're still productive now. It's easy to get into the habit of just doing things because it's what we always did. And we never want to do that if we want to grow. We want to look at not just how we can get better and add new things, but also how we can prune out the old stuff that isn't giving us results anymore. So in jiu-jitsu, same thing. Don't assume that just because something worked really well for you years ago, it's going to work for you forever. A big part of growth isn't just learning more details, it's also discarding things that you've outgrown, either because they're no longer working against better opponents, or maybe you've just found better options. As they say, often the best decision isn't what you choose to do, it's what you choose not to do. So, there's an explanation of systematic abandonment. We've got an article about that on our website as well. You can find that and more episodes like this at BJJmentalmodels.com. And if you haven't already done so, please do consider going premium with us. We make a lot of content, but the stuff that really can change your game, both from the perspective of long-form courses, as well as premium podcasts with pros like Emily Kwok and Rob Bernacki, and also our amazing community and coaching, all of that is at BJJ Mental Models Premium, which you can find at BJJmentalmodels.com. Link in the show notes, but it's easy to find, just hit the website. Anyway, thanks as always for listening to this one. I hope you enjoyed it and got some value out of it. I always appreciate everyone spending their time here with us at BJJ Mental Models. So again, thank you, and I'll talk to you in the next one.