Big milestone, because this is my 10th year writing on my birthday!
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One. This is a story of my Brazilian jiu-jitsu training. I originally started training almost 8 years ago. One of the early influences was actually my co-founder Yang, who, as you may know, has a black belt. My journey has been incredibly inconsistent. Between Covid, kids, work, moving cities and struggling to find a gym I fit in, and endless injuries (separated shoulder, cut on my retina, both dislocated pinkies, both rolled ankles, pulled lower back, and on and on), I feel like I rarely trained consistently.
All these years I was stuck at the beginner level, white belt. Eventually, I stopped training wearing a gi (a gi is a traditional uniform or kimono) and opted for training no-gi style (just in a rash guard and shorts). Many gyms don't recognize progress with belts if you train no-gi, so I felt like subconsciously I found a loophole — I can train no-gi and never face the fact that I never officially progressed past white belt. This continued for years until something happened this January.
My kids also train jiu-jitsu at another gym, and increasingly I grew frustrated with the "instructors" who help the main coach given there are many kids in the class. These instructors are often teenagers, with sloppy technique and no ability to deal with a bunch of 5-year-olds. So in January, I came up to the main coach and asked him why these teenagers teach and why I couldn't. To which he said that I need to have a blue belt, and the only way I can get it is if I pick up training wearing a gi and earn the blue belt.
That was the moment of truth for me because I faced the now-obvious realization that I hadn't been pushing myself for years, and had built up many convenient excuses not to face the reality that I was stuck and not growing.
So in January, I dusted off my old gi that I hadn't worn for 5 years, and got to work. Obviously, I was not a beginner at jiu-jitsu, but I still needed to remember a bunch of techniques (training in a gi is quite different from training no-gi).
This year I finally got rewarded and earned my blue belt, and I was finally able to instruct the Friday night class to teach my kids!
Friday night
The journey over the past year was a great one and I took away many lessons that I am trying to bring to work too. I think the key insights were:
Discovering that my non-committal attitude has a cost (inability to be the instructor during my kids' classes).
Realizing that I wasn't on the path to achieve my goal (I couldn't get a blue belt at this gym training no-gi).
Understanding I need to step up whatever I am doing to change the trajectory of my growth (go back to training in a gi, embrace that my fingers will be mangled, train through injury, develop new mental models to train harder).
Blue belt also gave me the confidence to challenge myself to an invitational tournament, which may be a story for another time.
Two. I can’t say I have ever been religious. My family occasionally went to church when I was growing up to light a candle and say a prayer. However, to me, it felt a bit transactional because religion was never really discussed in my household, and as I grew older I found myself in the atheist camp. I had no experiences that helped me relate, and no one to talk to about it. I just simply couldn’t understand so much about faith. For example, for years I couldn’t understand how believing something makes something true. Doesn’t truth have to be objective?
However, this year, something changed. I’m not even sure if I’m using the right language to describe it, but I stopped thinking about faith as something I need to be convinced of, and instead found peace in the act of believing.
I never called myself a nervous flyer in the past, but since having a family, I’ve become one. On one of the flights for work this year, the plane was flying through particularly bad turbulence. What was interesting was that I was able to later reflect on where my mind went in that moment, and where it went was to my family. The only thing that gave me comfort in that moment was thinking about how my son’s, my daughter’s, and my wife's hair smell. How each of their heads feels on my shoulder when they lie on me. How it feels when I hug them or wrap my arms around them when they sleep.
Holding onto the gifts my kids made for my trip through the turbulence: a “dino-car” from my 3-year-old and a spaceship from my 5-year-old.
I found myself in a state where I thought, if the plane takes a nosedive now and smashes into the ground, these are the thoughts I want to go out with. For the first time, I desperately wished heaven existed and that there is a way I can be with my family and not be separated from them. For the first time, I saw how much the simple act of believing in heaven and believing I would stay with my family has changed my present.