More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The more you look around, the more you see that everyone is fighting something.
It demonstrates not only greatness but a kind of monstrous determination, a drive to a killer instinct on a completely different level.
At its heart, wrestling is about intensity and pure conditioning. There is always a body on you, continuously in contact. The whole point is to dominate physically, and there aren’t a lot of ways to rest in a match—basically you’re going the whole time, all six or nine minutes. Wrestling is more tiring than fighting because it’s pure, and it’s more exhausting than grappling because it’s so positional. It’s a battle of will, and nothing destroys will like fatigue.
The man himself is just that, just a man dealing with his legend.
and my whole life was preparation for my profession.”
Dan gets fired up about this. He talks about the four-minute mile—how the journalists of the day were convinced the four-minute mile was the limit of human speed. In 1954, Roger Bannister crashed that wall and ran under four minutes because he believed overtraining to be a myth.
said, “The man who can drive himself further once the effort gets painful is the man who will win.”
the longer you meditate the more you realize pain is just an illusion.
This is what Dan is all about, confounding experts, performing at levels that no one dared yet imagine. There’s always another level. People may not understand it, may not be able to grasp it, but there’s always another level.
It’s easier to teach the skills than the mentality.”
Without examples, it won’t happen. And there’s not many out there who have it. A lot of them have the science, but only a few have the mentality.
People think that they’re working hard, and they are, but there are other levels. You’ve got to have all the support, and the environment, and you have to have an imagination that’s unreal.” I was reminded of the stories of Dan’s childhood, where he would pretend to be a famous ballplayer and talk about how “real” it felt to him. Imagination is a crucial component, oft overlooked. If you can’t imagine running a four-minute mile, how can you ever run it? Gandhi said, “Men often become what they believe themselves to be. If I believe I cannot do something, it makes me incapable of doing it. But
...more
Perhaps Freddie mumbles more than he might otherwise, but he’s not punchy. His mind and his intellect are deep, his eyes quiet and shielded behind his glasses. You get the feeling Freddie knows all kinds of things. Like any good boxing trainer—anybody who is good at making a living building fighters—he can look right through your exterior and see what’s happening inside.
power, but that has to be a part of it. Nobody becomes a world champion who isn’t naturally stronger and faster than other men. But then there comes the dedication, the ability to learn and listen, the fire to get in the ring and work and get up and run every morning. And it’s not six months, or even a year; anyone can do that. It’s five years, it’s eight years, ten years. That’s some serious fuel. The monastic lifestyle, “clean living” has to be a choice.
Josh Waitzkin, a chess prodigy and martial artist (and whom I’ll write more about later), wrote a book called The Art of Learning, and in it he describes the different types of chess kids he was teaching. He discusses at length “entity” versus “incremental” forms of learning, so classified by developmental psychologists. “Entity” kids think their chess skill is born of natural and innate ability, a pure talent, while “incremental” kids think they learned chess incrementally, step-by-step, and that hard work pays off.
Entity kids were brittle; when they lost, their faith in their talent was shaken. The incremental kids, who believed in the power of labor, would keep digging in the trenches, even if faced with insurmountable problems.
Successful fighters have things that work for them, and work incredibly well, but the great champions are those who can accept, internalize, and understand defeat.
I’ve seen guys that couldn’t run or jump for shit, with no coordination at all, become unbelievable champions because they dedicated themselves.
The other fighting arts, even judo, wrestling, boxing, they all depend on athleticism. I train judo my whole life but the moment I get out of shape I lose everything. Boxing you need speed, even when you have a lot of experience. Jiu-jitsu is about dedication and knowledge.”
When I first started studying jiu-jitsu, the first thought in my mind was, wow this is just like chess. And it is, in a sense, because chess also has a strong positional component.
you understand the board, take a strong position, and good things happen. You don’t necessarily see the way you’re going to win, but with a dominant position you start to force your opponent to do things like take bad positions until you capture material. In the beginning you do good things, such as occupying the center of the board, and you position your pieces where they have open files to attack. You develop with tempo, you improve your position and force him to retreat, which builds in a time advantage for you that will show up later, in chances to take pieces.
“He doesn’t get frustrated when he gets beat up. Frustration can take your stamina, your appetite for winning. You get angry at yourself, not the guy beating you. Not Rodrigo. He often gets his ass kicked in the first round and most people would think, ‘What do I have to do different?’ but he just waits calmly for his chances. People say he starts slow, but he starts at the same speed he’s going to run all through the fight. He keeps going at the same level, and by the end he’s going faster than the other guy, who gets tired.”
Just because you lose doesn’t make you a loser. It’s not the same fight every time.
“Everyone is the same for the first two minutes, everyone has a chance to win, but after that you start to separate physically and technically.”
Ali as a myth and a man doesn’t really make any sense unless you watch him move, unless you see him fight.
Marcelo said, “I never bother getting angry. I don’t need it. I don’t confuse angry with intense. I think being angry makes you tired. I perform at a high level without it.”
I’m struck again by how humble these guys are. How nice. How pleasant to be around. I used to think it was a product of being great—that the truly great fighters learned humility in the process of becoming great. But suddenly I am struck with a “chicken or the egg” question—which came first? Listening at length to Marcelo, Liborio, Eddie Bravo, and Sean Williams talk about jiu-jitsu, I start to think that maybe it’s the other way around, that you can’t be great without humility. The most humble guys, who are the most open and willing to learn, are the ones who become the best. Maybe you can’t
...more
Everything false has been burned away; like many great fighters there’s mostly honesty and pure emotion. Like an asteroid falling to the earth, these people have endured so much beyond the limits of what they thought was human endurance that any falseness and cuteness, anything extraneous, got seared off.
“Success in ultras depends on the ability to sustain discomfort for prolonged periods of time, whether it’s hours or days or many days ... it’s just that. All it takes to relieve it is to stop—and that’s what we’re fighting against, all the time.”
“Your body sends signals to your mind, It’s time to stop, let up, this doesn’t feel good, it HURTS! The mind has to override the signal.
That’s what mental training is about, learning to deal with signals and what you can override, and what you shouldn’t.”
I watched The Runner, the documentary about Horton’s record-breaking Pacific Crest Trail run from Mexico to Canada in sixty-six days with a 300,000-foot total elevation change. That’s averaging more than 4,500 feet of change a day, which is horrific. It’s an ungodly amount of up and down.
When I asked him about using his emotions, David responded eagerly, almost confessing a dirty secret: “One of the things I do, it sounds strange, I sometimes will make myself cry. I’ll think about my family, or home, or I’ll start singing a sad song, and I’ll start crying. Then after I cry, I feel better—not just mentally but physically. Physically, I FEEL BETTER.” He constructs a cathartic release for himself, something the ancient Greeks thought would restore and purify you.
“Commitment to a goal, that’s a big part of ultrarunning. Doing what you said you were going to do. It’s as simple as that. Part of it is that I tell people; I have a team that helps me.” David sets himself up, he talks about his goals, to give him another reason not to quit later. He’s
What is a good man but a bad man’s teacher? What is a bad man but a good man’s job? If you don’t understand this, you will get lost, However intelligent you are. It is the great secret. —Lao-tzu
I would sit on a cliff and watch other players get caught in the rain. Some guys would stand there, breathe it in, and get wet. They’d look out at the ocean. Other guys would put their hands over their head and run desperately for cover. When you observe that kind of moment, when people are caught off guard, you can start to see how they are as humans and competitors.
“People are usually too aware of tells. You’re looking for them but they know it, and they’re going to be illusory. They’ll be manipulating you with their own tells. So I plant ‘minipatterns’ on an opponent, in tai chi and jiu-jitsu. I give them dogma, a false construct. I convince them that A leads to B, A leads to B, and then suddenly when A doesn’t lead to B anymore they’re fucked. False assumptions.”
“You have to control your side of the board before you start messing with his,” is a chess truism, meaning maintain control of your own emotions, tells, and psychology before you begin the head games. A bit like the poker saw, “If you can’t spot the sucker at the table in ten minutes then you’re the sucker.”
“My vision of martial arts, of fighting, is that it relates to dual currents, the psychological reality and the technical reality—the position as it actually is. Very often in chess you’ll have a moment when one person will have a superior position, but the other person has a greater clarity of mind. The one can transcend the other. The Gracies’ always talk about jiu-jitsu and using breathing, yours to control his. If you’re breathing slower, your clarity is better.
It’s hard to outwait the opponent; when I try it, my inclination is to get moving and try something. But the key is to wait, wait, wait for the guy on bottom to commit to something, and then explode in the opposite direction. Chad exploits that exact tension.
I was reminded of Pat Miletich; sometimes the best way to beat a guy is to go into his strengths, not his weakness, to go where he doesn’t expect you, where he feels so confident he’s vulnerable. If you can get him to show a weakness, a flaw, a tiny crack in his strength—like Gable said, “loosen that wire in his brain.”
The way to survive and thrive under that pressure is through presence.
if deep, fluid presence becomes second nature, then life, art and learning take on a richness that will continually surprise and delight
The secret is that everything is always on the line. The more present we are at practice, the more present we will be in competition, in the board room, at
Before meeting Josh, I thought about what happens to a fifteen-year-old kid who has had a movie made about his life. It could easily destroy someone.
Lesser fame than that has ruined lives; the narcissism that celebrity seems to generate can cripple people.
And also grit—there’s an essence of grit to fight through something like that. You have to get down and dirty and battle with yourself. I am just like everyone else. My work can be great but I’m nothing special. If you don’t win that one, you’re finished as an artist, a student, a fighter. Josh won that battle, maybe his most important fight.
We talked about innate ability, how a six-year-old gets drawn to chess, and he said, “There are a lot of people who could do it ... maybe not everybody, but you’d be surprised—a lot of different minds, if taught in a way that used the natural strength of that mind, could be great at chess.”
