First lesson: don’t aim to win
Two years ago I started jiujitsu. The way jiujitsu works is this: two people give a fist bump and they start rolling/sparring. During the roll, both people (essentially) try to break other person’s limbs or choke each other. Once someone taps/surrenders, the roll ends and they restart. I remember early on my brain kept telling me “don’t tap! don’t tap!”. Why should I be okay with losing? Between winning and losing, shouldn’t I be aiming to win? I thought I was not alone in thinking this way, but weirdly no one in the gym was doing that. No one felt bad about tapping, not even the higher belts. I even see a purple belt tap when rolling with a white belt. And so contrary to my expectation, the first lesson I learned from jiujitsu was: “don’t aim to win.”
Second lesson: anyone can get good
The key to knowing what to do in jiujitsu is understanding what not to do. In jiujitsu, the feedback loop for each action and decision is immediate: if I push my opponent away with straight arms while on my back — a common beginner mistake — I’ll quickly learn it is a bad idea. It doesn’t take a genius to connect “when I try to do X my arm gets broken” with “I’ll avoid doing X next time”. On the contrary, when feedback loop is long, learning becomes frustrating. Most people mistake this with “I am not born smart to do this”, when in fact they just need a smaller feedback loop to learn very quickly what not to do, so that they know what to do.
Third lesson: everyone is a teacher
At first, I was surprised to see white belts teaching white belts at my gym. But turns out this is a very common thing: at the end of every roll, people often chit chat, and I’ve heard people ask: “how did you manage to get to my back?”, “wow! that choke was good. how did you do that?”, or “that’s a cool move, can you show me again?”. This is unlike certain parts of society where only “experts” with credentials are allowed to teach while everyone else is unqualified. In jiujitsu, everyone has the responsibility to teach, and so everyone is a teacher.
Fourth lesson: learn first, then apply
In jiujitsu, there are structured classes and open mats: structured classes are lessons taught by black belts where everyone works on the same set of techniques together; open mats are special times where everyone gets to roll openly. At my gym, I got to learn techniques/principles during weekday classes and apply them during my rolls on Saturday open mats. This cycle repeats weekly. Jiujitsu has taught me that techniques are useless if I weren’t given the opportunity to apply them, and open rolls alone are useless if I weren’t given the opportunity to learn old/new techniques during classes. There is a time to learn, and a time to apply. Both are important together.
Fifth lesson: do this for the journey, not the destination
I say jiujitsu is about the journey not the destination, but it is always difficult to separate the two. If a person has never done jiujitsu, they will only see the destination (the color of the belt), never the journey (what it takes to get there). How can someone not care about the destination when that is what everyone else sees? What I’ve realized: there is no destination. If there were, then what would we do after we reach it? Getting to “black belt” is also not a destination, because the best black belts I know are still learning as though they are white belts. At the end of the day, I want to believe that it is the people we meet, the partners we roll with, and the ego we (try to) suppress. That’s why I do jiujitsu.