“You cannot talk your way into jiu-jitsu. It has to be done physically and sometimes that means facing your fears of tapping, getting hurt, being intimidated, etc. Believe me, I have felt all those, but to improve you must work through them. It’s one of the lessons that bjj teaches.”

I know he means you can’t learn bjj second hand, you have to train, and training in bjj means training “live” which means rolling which means “fears of tapping, getting hurt, being intimidated, etc.”

HOWEVER I would also counter that if you have to talk the Man Inside into getting with the program, so be it, chalk it up to positive thinking, self-improvement, self-hypnosis, whatever – by and large we live in a very “civilized,” “non-physical” world where the Head is usually much bigger than the Heart – so we’ve got to deal with that.

Unlike the essayist, I didn’t start bjj then drop out, but I had an opportunity to take it up much earlier but didn’t, because I had to “talk myself into it.”

When I was in the military, I would see people get promoted because they could pass a test and answer some questions. They never worked hard to earn the right for that promotion, they just needed people of that rank and if you could pass the tests and questions you were promoted. I hated that because that’s how you get people who “slip through the cracks!”

Also, I’m not a big fan of charging for your belt. Kind of like when you have to pay for your driving test and you get nervous and fail because you are thinking more about the money you would loose if you failed then the actually test and you performance suffers. Also if you are claiming the money goes to pay for the actual belt then stop. I can buy my own belt for about 10 bucks off the interweb and hand it to you so when you are ready to promote me, you have it. But then again, maybe that violates some sort of tradition…hmmm!