Can You Live a Jiu-Jitsu Centric Life?

I’m going to do my best to not get philosophical during this post. A bit of my personal philosophy may creep in here and there, but I’ll try my best to be as normal a human as possible.

Listen, we are all in the same boat. Life is going to throw us curve ball after curve ball. There may be ups and there my be downs. The trick is, in my opinion, to learn how to ride the waves as best as possible, but more importantly, how to acquire a surf board as opposed to just floating in the ocean trying to swim. If you are stuck with the later, your arms may get tired.

Analogies anyone?

I’m a watcher and a listener. One of my favorite pastimes is to seek out interesting and successful people and to observe them. I rarely attempt at reinventing the wheel. I let others do the research for me. If you’re a winner, I want to win right along side of you. I’ve done a lot of this and throughout my life, I’ve figured out a few things. One of which I’ll discuss below.

In order to be successful at anything, you need to be smart, but you also need to be focused. An old friend told me once that if you focus your whole heart on something, really focus it, there will eventually be no alternate route to a successful one (I won’t even touch the definition of success – that topic bores me).

I mentioned Eddie Bravo and Joe Rogan in a post I wrote yesterday. Both of these individuals are wildly successful in their respective careers. How did they become successful? Was Eddie Bravo painting cars at the same time he was competing on the world stage? Was Joe Rogan waiting tables as he was climbing the entertainment ladder? No, both of these guys were focused on getting better and better at what they were already good at.

But, there is a trick to all this and it’s important to mention here. In order to find and achieve your measure of success, you need to choose a growing and dynamic industry. If you do this, it’s going to make riding that wave all the more simple. And this really is the point of this post.

Can you make a life in Jiu-Jitsu?

A while back, in between all the other things I do in life, I realized that no matter how lousy the economy got, there were a few truisms:

1. People still love to get and stay in shape and Jiu-Jitsu is becoming wildly popular.

2. The online world is larger than it ever was and continues to grow. With all the new entrants every day, there’s a need for someone to guide them.

3. Instead of vacationing to Tahiti, people are looking for places to get away closer to home. The mountains being one such place.

After realizing these things, I’ve been positioning myself to take advantage of them. My life is changing immensely and in a year’s time, you should hopefully be reading very different posts. I have my fingers crossed and am excited by the prospects.

After my daily online browse this morning, I came across a great article that was written on November 25, 2025, so it’s obviously very relevant. It’s called, “A Reminder Of How Far Jiu-Jitsu Has Come.” In this article, the author tries to express the rapidly changing dynamic of the sport I love so much. I even alluded to Jiu-Jitsu’s growth potential in my previous post called, “Nate Diaz Breakdown by Rener and Ryron Gracie.” I did a horrible job of getting to my point in that post, but it was supposed to do with how creatively and successfully the Gracie brothers have taken advantage of a growing industry. They’ve adapted and changed and like I mentioned to my brother-in-law during last night’s conversation, they were like Chameleons in an ever changing environment. We all should be so talented.

I guess my point in this post is this: If you want to be successful at something, you need to make a hard choice on what that something is. Then, immerse yourself in it. Get great at it and then start branding yourself as an expert in it. No one else if going to do it for you. Sometimes in life, you just need to make a choice and get to work.

Eddie Bravo and Joe Rogan talk BJJ and MMA