BTG 167 - The most neglected skillset of champions

Hello and welcome to another episode of Breaking the Guard. On today's episode, I wanted to talk about what I would consider the most neglected part of training for all student types. Whether you're a hobbyist or a competitor or even a professional, this is one area that you don't see lots of instructional videos on. You don't see people really talking about it. And it's rare that you get questions about it in class, but I can tell you right now that without this area of the game being covered, your chances of being a champion are slim to none. If you are wise to the ways, then you probably know that what I'm talking about is mindset. It's how you deal with stress. It's your goal setting. There's all these mental skills that need to be developed in order to get the best from yourself, but it's not a sexy topic to talk about. No one wants to read about philosophy or psychology and figure out how to apply to them. And I understand why it's difficult. It's not as tangible as, oh, let's learn how to do an arm bar. We can see someone doing that and mimic it and eventually learn it ourselves. It's not as easy to mimic confidence. You can walk the walk, you know, as far as I can walk the way someone who's confident walks. I can imitate their speech patterns, but that doesn't mean you're actually confidence or confident rather. you're just imitating, but without understanding what it takes to be confident, you're still not gaining all the benefits of it. So, how do we learn these mental skills? What which are the ones that are most applicable to let's say for the sake of this discussion a competitor or even the hobbyist that just wants to get the most out of themselves, right? Cuz at a at the end of the day, that's really what we all should be striving for is not to be labeled number one. That would be nice, but honestly, who cares? It's getting the best out of yourself. If I can get the best performance for myself, whether I'm number one or number 100, it doesn't matter. I did the best that I could. That's all I could hang on myself, right? I can't push any further than my best performance. And I feel that should be the goal of everybody training is to get more out of yourself and hopefully towards your best. First mental asset that we need to have is confidence. I already called that one out. And confidence I feel it's going to be built on a few things that most of us are doing already. One is skill training. We generally gain confidence by seeing evidence of our skill in the real world of our prowess. Right? If we think in another example, usually a young man who's never dated anybody will be very unconfident with women, right? And over time, as he starts dating and talking to women, he builds confidence because he realized, "Oh, I'm not getting slapped in the face first time I'm meeting them. Uh, I'm I'm getting a smile. I'm getting a laugh. I obviously have some type of charm." And that kind of starts to build over time. It's the same thing with martial arts or any sport. If every time I shot a double leg, I just went face first into the ground and ate crap, it'll be hard to build confidence in your double leg because the real world is not showing you that. But when you start getting small wins, and they don't have to be big wins, but at least a small win, we start to build on that, right? Like now, oh, I I was able to penetrate deep on the double leg. Oh, this time I got up to my feet and cut the corner. And then the next time, oh, I I got him to his butt. I didn't finish it. I gummed to his butt. And now we're starting to build more confidence. And it's a snowball effect over time. You build more and more and more until suddenly now you're quite confident in your ability to do something. So to me just the training and this is true with a lot of the virtues will get you probably 90% there but it doesn't get you all the way there and with certain people the psychological component might be the bigger factor than actually the real world evidence right but I think for confidence a lot of it is going to be based on real world results So training continuously and making small improvements over time. But then on the other side of things is working mentally on building your confidence. What is the self-t talk that you have going on in your head, right? Or at least in private because I've realized now not everybody has an inner dialogue, right? So that's fine. But what are the type of thoughts and images that you have about your abilities? Right? Do you see yourself as a champion, as a top performer, as a conqueror, as somebody who will crush their opponents? Or do you see yourself in the middle of the pack, like just another guy, the average Joe, or do you see yourself below that? You're like the bottom of the totem pole. You're the run to the litter. You're barely someone that should be noticed because that image of yourself is going to affect your confidence in a huge way. Because even when you are gaining good results, they are contrary to your self-image. And your self-image will tend to trump even the real world results. And we've all seen this in some shape or form with somebody before where you know somebody is extremely talented but then when they go to perform in a live audience they totally crumble. And to me that could be a sign of the inongruence of their confidence with their abilities. Like in that case the person's abilities are actually quite high but their confidence is quite low. Normally people build them pretty closely together, but it doesn't always happen that way. And again, that's why everybody's very different. Sometimes people are more psychologically stunted than they are skill stunted, if you if you will. So doing more work in the gym doesn't actually help raise their confidence. Like we have to do something off the gym, okay? We have to, you know, whether it's working with a sports psychologist or something like that, which is doing the work with yourself, reading self-help books and asking yourself tough questions to figure out why you have such a negative self-image. But that is going to be a challenge and it's going to be a different challenge for everybody because everybody's going to have different reasons for having a poor self-image. one that might be maybe your parents were cruel to you and or maybe you were bullied and you never got over that and your self-image is still really low as a result. So then it's going to have to re we're going to have to go back and dig, you know, and figure out why we feel so low about ourselves and start being objective about our current situation. Some people get trapped on an old concept of themselves and they have this idea that they've never changed from that initial person. And the reality is we're always changing. The world's always changing and we're part of the world. So we're changing too. Even if you feel that everything in your life is static personally, if the world around you is constantly changing, then you're changing too. whether you like it or not because you're part of this world. I feel that if people understood that a little better that they might be able to adapt more to the current circumstances of their life and realize, hey, you know, I may have been bullied. I may have been the run of the litter. I may have had, you know, a bad upbringing, but that doesn't mean that I have to remain in that station or in that state forever. I am all the way over here now. That was in the past. In the future, I can remodel myself. It's totally in everyone's capability. Doesn't mean everybody's going to do it, but it is in their capability. It's just I feel an awareness that needs to be had in order to overcome that confidence bump. As I said, most people tend to build confidence on par with their skill building, but not everyone does. And we know and I know a lot of people that haven't had that that their skill levels here but their confidence is here. So in the training room they can still operate but under stress in a competition setting they falter. To me that's like I said a disparity between confidence and skill. So we have to build that confidence. What are some ways that we can do that? One of them is by positive selft talk, positive affirmations, having people around you that help build you instead of break you down. If you're surrounded by a bunch of people that feel like they're quote unquote losers and you already feel that way, guess what? You're probably not going to advance too much because the consensus is we're all losers and we're just going to stay that way. where we we we were just given a bad hand in life. You need to surround yourself with people who are winners, right? People who believe they can do more, are capable of great things. You need to be around that because those type of people tend to want to surround themselves with other people like them and they want to be built up. So, it's a upward spiral instead of a downward spiral. Doing the homework right, training, building your skills will also help to develop that confidence. Like I said just from the physical aspect mentally I said uh the selft talk positive affirmations good friend circle again studying sports psychology and understanding the different ways that we get motivated and or we help build our confidence maybe even having a therapist. Again, it depends on the extent of the the hurdle you have to jump through. But these are various things that we can do to help build our skill level. And I think just a lot of self-reflection, meditation, and talking to yourself about why you feel a certain way about yourself, right? Especially when we're talking about confidence. I think it's sad when somebody does not have that type of belief in themselves. Like there I've told you I feel especially a lot of fighters we have what most people would consider delusional levels of self-confidence right and I think men tend to fall into that category more out of necessity which is we overestimate our abilities uh which to me is generally a good thing right uh I don't want to underestimate myself at any point in time. I always want to ideally be accurate with my estimation, but if anything, I'm shooting a little over the mark. And even if I miss where I believe I should be or I am, I'll make up for it eventually. So I believe it's an important part of every person to build up that confidence because everything else in life is going to follow from that. And people who are very confident have that aura about them. And I believe that also that's what I believe a good leader is able to endow onto their followers, which is they have such an air of confidence about them. They're so certain of themselves and of their plans and of their team that if you're part of that team, you're like, man, this guy really believes in us. He really believes in the mission. I can do this, right? He wouldn't I wouldn't be in this team if he didn't think I could do it. And that instills confidence in others. And again, this is what I'm talking about with the upward spiral. Because if I'm the leader and I see my guys being motivated by my belief, it reaffirms everything I'm saying and everything I believe. And I I feel that it's something that everyone should work on getting. It doesn't happen by accident. You have to work on it. And in the I was talking about how people can mimic and fake confidence and sometimes that's part of it because psychology is affected by physiology. If I walked around all day with my head down, not making eye contact with anybody and kind of talking, you know, low and that is a projection of my self-image. What does that mean? I'm not looking anyone in the eye because I have shame or I lack the confidence to look someone in the eye and feel like I can match their gaze. So, I'm going to avoid their gaze, right? And I talk lower because I'm not trying to draw attention myself. I'm not trying to show strength or pride because I don't have those things. So sometimes adopting the physiology of somebody who's confident, you know, who the shoulders are up high, head up, chin up, making eye contact with everybody, firm handshake, uh, and, you know, strutting about that will affect your self-image because now you're adopting the the physical appearance of somebody who's confident. Like I said, it doesn't fix everything, but it will help with certain things and it will tend to put you in a better state of mind for building more confidence. I I think it's going to be harder to build confidence if you're being very meek and low and head down and not impossible, but it's going to be a little more challenging because you're not adopting the posture or you're not the habits of somebody who is very confident, right? So that's one mental skill that needs a lot of work and I feel needs to be developed ideally pretty early in your life or in your career in your sport because it's going to be hard to make a lot of cover a lot of ground if you don't have that not impossible but it's a lot more challenging The second skill that generally comes handinhand with this and maybe before it is discipline, right? Everyone loves the idea of being motivated because when you're highly motivated, it it generally becomes quite easy to do things because the motivation is doing most of the work. But as we've all heard maybe from me or from other people, the motivation is like a glass with a hole at the bottom. You can get quickly motivated, but then it could drain over time. And if you're relying on that motivation to carry you the whole way through, you're going to have problems, right? Cuz you'll start off great and then you'll just start to slowly taper out and then eventually you run out of gas. And if you've seen anybody do fat diets or fitness routines, that generally is what happens to them. There's a few ways you can address this. One is you have to constantly tap into being motivated and this is similar to the confidence thing. Surround yourself with people who motivate you who who say good things about you or read books, watch movies, you know, find sources of motivation much like you to find sources of food or water and cultivate them so you can actively keep yourself motivated. Whenever you start feeling down, read that book or read that passage that gets you going, right? And reminds you of your goals and what you're looking for. That can help reinvigorate the motivation. So, don't think of it as a oneanddone thing. It's like taking a shower. You got to do it on a regular basis. You can't just do it once and never do it again. It's the same way with motivation. You got to constantly motivate yourself. But even with that in your favor, it's not always going to work. And the dis the discipline is going to have to kick in. And it's the trait that's common amongst any high achiever is that they're highly disciplined. And what did discipline mean in this context? the power to make yourself do whatever it is that you need to do to accomplish your goals. You don't allow excuses, people, events, sickness, anything to get in the way. If it's something that needs to be done because you've already set a goal and this is part of the goals process, it's going to be done. When you have a high level of discipline, you're able to accomplish anything in time. I have made posts about this before, but just to be brief, one of the easiest way to build discipline is baby steps, just small little steps. Normally, people fail on a goal because they set the bar way too high. For example, maybe I'm 100 pounds overweight and let's say I'm eating 7,000 calories a day. I do zero exercise. So, I go, you know what? I want to lose 100 pounds in 3 months. I'm going to crash diet, do 1500 calories a day, and I'm going to work out 3 hours a day. Beginning, you're highly motivated, you're pumped, and you blast through week one. And by the time you pass week one, now you're on a downhill skid. It's starting to get very hard to keep it going. Why? Motivation is draining and you've bit off a lot more than you can chew. You've created such a huge demand of discipline to be able to keep that routine that you don't have. Right? The motivation allowed you. it like buffered you for a time but once the motivation drains you do not have the prowess of discipline to be able to gut through it. Discipline is very much a muscle. It's a mental muscle is a force that you're able to push yourself through the inertia of getting something done. And we all know that feeling where like there's a chore that you have to do. You're like I really don't want to do it. and you'll do anything else but the thing that you need to do, right? And I'm sure we've all done this at some point. You kind of stall out or procrastinate even being productive by doing other things except the thing that you really need to get done. Discipline plows through it. But like a muscle, it has to be developed and you can't force it. That would be like, I want to get a 400 lb bench press and I've never benched before and I just load up 400 lb off the get- go. You're going to get crushed. You're not going to get there, right? How do you build discipline? Just like everything else over time, baby steps. Start off with small tasks that are easily accomplished. So, I actually gave a lesson plan on how to do this, which was start with something very simple, maybe something you do already, but you don't even realize it. Like, most people are brushing your teeth before going to bed, right? That's a discipline task. Add that to a list. Uh 10 push-ups a day. Uh 10 crunches a day. Read for at least 10 minutes a day. And you start adding little tasks. And I would do them one at a time. Once I can do a task for like five days and I'm good. Okay, let's add another task. So maybe if you're starting from nothing, okay, well, let's just get the hygiene going. Just brush our teeth, you know, at least once a day. Then we move on. Okay, now I add 10 push-ups a day. Then I move on from there. Maybe I write down my the thing I want to accomplish most in that day first thing when I wake up. That'll take me like 30 seconds at most. And I can start building on these things by either adding new tasks or extending tasks. Now, instead of 10 push-ups, it's 20 push-ups. Or instead of writing my first thought, I write my first thought. And then at the end of the day, I write a recap of what happened that day. and we start stretching the boundary, right? Just like when weightlifting, you slowly increment weight as you develop the strength to to overcome the challenge. It's the same with a discipline. I increase the difficulty of the the tasks that I give myself on a daily basis over time. The key with discipline is that it has to happen every time. There's no exceptions exceptions and there's no excuses that are allowed. If you allow yourself that breathing room of saying, "Oh, this one time I could miss it." The discipline just it's like a house of cards. It collapses entirely. It's it's contrary to what discipline is about, which is pushing through the times that are difficult. If I said I was going to do 10 push-ups every day and now it's like Sunday 12:00 a.m. I'm like, "Oh, I forgot to do it. I'll do it tomorrow." Nope. You do it right there. Doesn't matter if it's 12:00 at night, 3:00 in the morning. If you're conscious, you do it. That is the power of discipline. Now, hopefully you're not waiting until that last moment to do it every time, but if it is, so be it. you do it. When you develop enough of this muscle of discipline, this force of will over time it becomes easier to take on bigger challenges, right? Like now if I'm doing like 30 different tasks a day, you know, where I am uh I'm doing my hygiene routines, I'm doing fitness routines, I'm doing journaling routines, doing work routines, I So now I have like a bunch of things I'm constantly doing daily, which chances are it means you're going to be a very productive individual. I can then easily divert that muscle into wherever I need it to and go, okay, you know what? Now, I'm going to change up the fitness routine entirely to address this new goal and and redirect my discipline. And you'll find that, oh, it's not that hard anymore because I have so much discipline built up. Doesn't happen on the first go, though. That's why, again, that's how you, in my opinion, this is how you build it. Baby steps. Start small, work your way up. Once you're able to amass a a decent size list of discipline, we can start looking to tackle bigger challenges. Now, I mentioned a lot of these are daily. I feel like the small things we should make daily because we're going to get more reps of those, which is again going to build more confidence in your discipline. But it's not inherent that every discipline task has to be daily. Maybe the discipline task is weekly. Like I want to run 5 miles a week. I can section off however I need to but at the end of that week five miles have to be achieved or I want to read a book every week. Right? These are all very doable. So the discipline doesn't have to be daily. I do think starting though you should have some daily ones. The easy ones, like I said, the basic hygiene ones. Uh, I would say 10 push-ups, 10 crunches, 10 squats, some small amount of exercise that you can slowly increment. You could do 10 push-ups, 15, 20, 25, 30 to a level that is easily doable based on your level of fitness. That takes about a minute of time, but it keeps you focused, right? And you could layer those more. I wouldn't go too much more on a discipline task, especially if it's fitness related. That's going to take over. Your fitness tasks probably shouldn't take you over an hour. And that would be pushing it, right? That would be like I'm running, you know, two miles a day and I'm doing like 100 push-ups, 100 crunches, 100. Like those are great, but once you start going over that, it's going to be challenging to keep on a daily because life, right? That you're going to have to travel one day and it's going to put you in a real pinch. And if you have an hour of work to do, it's going to be tricky, right? Because if it's like 2 in the morning and you end up landing somewhere you haven't had the time to do any of that, life's going to suck for you, you know, there. Whereas, if it's a 10-minute thing, you can crank out 10 minutes pretty easily, right? And like I said, it just depends on your level of discipline. All right? If you're like a David Gogggins, then you could probably do a three-hour thing every day and you'll always find the time to do it. But realistically, for most people, like I said, try to keep it on the shorter side. The the point of it isn't to make it so challenging. It's just to make it continuous. So, we talked about confidence, we talked about discipline. These are two very important skills to develop. I I mean, we can probably do this for quite a while. Maybe I'll do another episode based off this. I'll do one more right now, which is also very important. And without this mental virtue, you probably won't do the first two. because you won't trust me or you won't think I have the authority to be able to teach you because you're up here and maybe I'm down here. And that would be humility. Having humility to me is a hallmark of somebody who is a student of life. You won't be able to learn from somebody if you think you're better than them, you're smarter than them, you're faster, stronger, more knowledgeable, you're older, or you're more talented, whatever the judgment is that ranks you above them. When you are above somebody, you tend to look down in both metaphorically metaphor physical and think what could you teach me from down there that I don't already know better than you up here. So even when somebody down there has sage wisdom, you will ignore it. You will dismiss it at your peril. Now is it always wrong to ignore somebody who quote unquote is below you? No, but it's not always right either. You've if you've been listening to me for some time, I told you I've learned many things from students and white belts as a black belt. That doesn't happen without humility. And I'm not always talking about like, oh, I did something cool to them. I learned through them. No, no. I mean having a white belt come up to me. He goes, hey, can I show you something? I'm like, sure. It's like, "Oh, have you seen this before?" Most of the time that happens. And what does somebody who's a higher rank do? They tune out right away cuz like, oh, this freaking white belt thinks they've discovered something new or they've seen something new. Like, I've I've learned more. I've forgotten more than they ever were will learn, right? That that whole line. But if you listen intently and respectfully, you might learn something someday. and I have several times and on things that I use regularly now. So being humble doesn't mean that you think you're worse than people, which is what arrogant people think. They think somebody who's humble is meek and they have low confidence. They they misattribute uh being humble with feeling beneath people because that's how they would feel because in my opinion their ego has that insecurity in place. They project a lot more their confidence because it's fragile. It's a shell that's not very robust. When you're a humble, it means you're so I Well, I guess it depends, right? You could be humble without being confident. But if you are very confident and you're humble, it shows a great strength of character in my opinion because it shows that you're so certain of yourself. You're not afraid to humble yourself beneath somebody who maybe others would judge as being below you. GSP had a story that he told the other day which exhibited this which was he went I guess somewhere in a safari and he was in the presence of a gorilla mountain gorilla you know the enormous murder machines and you know he did what you're supposed to do which is you look down because you don't match the gaze of a gorilla and he just kind of looked down. And then when the gorilla passed him, he looked at his guide and he's like, "Where is it?" And it turns out it was sitting behind him back like resting his back on his back. And he was like, "Oh my god." you know, and the guy told them the gorilla did this because he was a silverback and he was showing how much of a non-threat that GSP was to his family because he exposed his biggest weakness, which would be his back, to an stranger. But the stranger was perceived as such a non-threat that it didn't matter. That's a sense of humility, right? And uh that's a sense of what confidence will portray. So if somebody wants to show me something, even it doesn't matter if they're day one or day 1 million of training, I will listen with humility because I want to be sure that whatever they had to share with me, I might be able to learn something. And maybe the learning is not always about me gaining a new insight into a technique or a strategy or some concept. Maybe the insight is learning about the type of questions somebody may have or what are the things that people of this skill level of this age of this subset are thinking about so that I know how to tailor my instruction better. It's not always what you think it is. But if you are too arrogant or too high-minded and think that you can't be taught something, well, guess what? You won't be. And I don't think that's something to be proud of, to be so prideful that you can't listen to counsel or guidance. Now, it doesn't mean you have to follow it. Right? Like if someone comes up and, "Hey Dave, can I tell you something?" Like, "Yeah, what's going on?" Like, "I think you really should grab a brick and smash your head with it every day." I've been doing it for a week now and it's been giving me great results. I go, "Oh, okay. That's interesting. Doesn't mean I do it right. Especially you see he's covered in bruises, you know, like, yeah, I don't think that's working out quite right." Right. But I'll I'll hear you out at least, right? Uh, and most people are not that absurd. That's a ridiculous example. But my point being is all because you humble yourself before somebody doesn't mean that you're submitting to them, right? It just means that you're giving an opportunity for somebody to influence you. And based on the persuasive persuasiveness of their argument or of the knowledge that they're sharing, you can make your own decision. You shouldn't have to shut yourself off from it because some of the most genius things come from the most unlikeliest of places. And if you're too proud to look at those places, you're going to be missing out. So I feel like being humble allows you to learn much faster because you are basically absorbing all sources of knowledge. This requires obviously some internal filter as well to know okay this is crap this is good. So if you and and this is the danger of being a student in the beginning because you don't have the filter, you don't have the skill set to know what works and what doesn't. So if you go to train in a mc dojo and they start showing you some wacky stuff, chances are you will think that works because you don't have the internal filter, right? You because you just don't have enough knowledge or skill yet. And this can create distrust, right? Because now you go out to use something you thought worked and it doesn't. You get embarrassed or you get hurt. Now you distrust everybody. And your filter now has skewed to be too hard. So any time someone tries to show you something, you're like, "No, no, no. I don't trust you. I'm not listening to that." So this is why it's important to make sure that when you seek guidance and you seek counsel that you find counsel from people who are real experts, not just the first person you fell on the yellow pages or I guess nowadays on Google, right? Somebody who actually is a verifiable expert, ideally somebody who's achieved great things in what you want to learn from. Right? If I want to learn to be the best basketball player, I'm looking at the coaches and maybe the star athletes to see, okay, obviously they've gotten there. They know how to get there or they know the path that they took to get there. I don't go to people who've never done anything before and ask me. If I I wouldn't go to someone who's never played basketball and say, "Teach me how to play basketball." That's a recipe for disaster. So this is a little caveat to the humility thing because yeah, if you're being very humble in the beginning, which normally isn't too difficult when you know nothing, but you're trusting the wrong people with teaching you skills that they don't even possess. That could be a problem. But hopefully, chances are if you're watching this video, you probably have experience and you probably know have that internal filter to understand what's real, what's not, what's good, what's bad. Being humble will benefit you in having more access to knowledge. It also I've been talking about a lot about just acquisition of knowledge, but being humble also brings things down a notch in that when you lose a a big match, it won't be the end of the world for you. And when you win a big match, it also won't be the major defining moment in your life that everything else is going to pale to this like or you won't let your ego get out of control. Humility buffers both your wins and your losses so that they're taken as is. And I feel that's an important thing because just like people don't like a sore loser, they don't like a sore winner either. You want to see somebody who takes a a loss or win with grace. They can acknowledge defeat their part in it and work quickly to learn from it because they're humble. They're not making excuses. They're not trying to work around it and divert the blame to somebody else. They'll take full accountability and they know that's fine. Uh because again by being humble, they're not saying they're a godlike figure that never makes mistakes. Like no, I can't falter. I can't trip, but I will get back up and I will learn why and I will do my best to never let it happen again. Just like somebody who's humble in victory knows that I worked hard for this. I did everything right. And I'm sure my opponent probably did too. But my plan was better or I was better fit and today was my day. But I know that the next day maybe it isn't my day, right? And even in victory, there are things that I'm sure I could have done better and that I will acknowledge and improve upon as well. So besides one I think the most important things about humility is being able to learn and also just makes you likable. If you want to make friends easily being humble is an easy way to go. Uh when you're very arrogant you're going to rub a lot of people the wrong way. Now you will attract certain people right because they will feel that oh that arrogance means this person is so confident or that they must have accomplish great things to be this prideful. But I feel like you'll do a lot better just being humble because people will see like oh this guy's not pretentious. He's not uh he's very down to earth. it's a it's a very likable person. Uh so there's a lot of benefits to being humble and this is why like even I mean I'm not a religious person but from my understanding you could see like holy figures that will ritually wash the feet of the common person. You're like oh my god how can the pope do that? It's an exercise in humility right? He is somebody who's supposed to be prepared to be talking to God. Yet it's not beneath him to wash your feet. That's a strong message, right? That's that I mean, you don't get lower on a person than the soles of their feet. And that's what he's cleaning. So it's an exercise of humility and saying look even though I have the I can listen and speak to God allegedly I still am not better than you. I am humble myself before you and I will clean your feet. So there's something to be learned there. That's three of the things that you can work to build on. And well, I I guess I didn't describe how you would build humility. And because a lot of people feel like, oh, no, like I'm better than the white belt. I'm a brown belt. Or, you know, you might think, oh, I graduated from Ivy League college. I'm better than that person that, you know, works at McDonald's. Like you there's a lot of these snap judgments that you can make. And I feel like this is misunderstanding what those things are. All because you are a higher educated, which would be somebody who went to college and, you know, got a masters or a PhD, does not mean that you're better at somebody. You're better than somebody, right? What does it even mean to be better than somebody? That your life has more value than theirs? In what context? If we're talking about like academic contributions, yeah, you probably have more value. But towards humanity or you know what about this person's family? You don't have more value than them than than they than that person does to their family. Right? So it's a very subjective measurement. So I think people often attribute like what they consider one of their defining factors. Like if you're talking to me like oh you know I am the guy that made the Kimora trap famous and coined the term and like got a AC bronze medalist. So, as a grappler, that's like my defining characteristic. And anybody who is below that, I look down on, right? Like, that's stupid, right? That doesn't make any sense to me. No, I'm I'm good at jiu-jitsu. So, you say, "Am I better than this person and jiu-jitsu?" Probably. But as a person, no. We're generally all the same. you know, I mean, we all are this. We're all people and we all have different values based on our friend groups and our priorities. So, don't get it twisted in your head that even if you're like a top performer, you know, and you're doing you're doing everything right and you could see somebody who you would consider a bomb perform, maybe a guy who's a homeless guy, right? And it might be very easy to tell yourself, I'm better than that guy. I would question a few things. One, why is that even important to to think about? Why are you having that self-t talk like, "Oh, I'm better than that guy." Like, who are you trying to convince? Because to me, that's kind of a discussion of again somebody whose ego is a little fragile. And in order to feel good about themselves, they need to tear down other people. And they're getting that they're getting their confidence or their ego by difference, right? They're like, "Okay, I'm better than that guy. That means I I should feel good about myself." Versus just being self soothing and knowing that I feel value in myself. I don't need to see it in others and they compare because I believe in myself. I love myself. So, it's very easy to see the value of who I am and I don't need to gain value by bringing others down and then feeling well they're lower than me that means I'm good. So it and in my opinion the idea of measuring yourself to other people in value and saying that person's, you know, beneath me. Oh, that person's better than me. It's a dumb game to play. Now, skill-wise, of course, this is true. Like some person's going to be better at speaking, you know, Spanish than me. Many people, right? But it doesn't mean that that person's a better person than me, right? or that now that I have to submit to everything that person tells me or vice versa. We're all people. We all have different values and humility is acknowledging that and respecting that to the extent that I can learn from anybody that has valuable information. Doesn't matter where they come from. They can be poor, they can be rich, you know, they can be the world champion or they could be the first day student doesn't make a difference. If they have valuable information, I can learn from them. That is what I feel humility is. And sometimes, like I said, the information that's valuable is not always what you think it is. It might not be the treasure map. It might be where not to go and there's still valuing that. And I feel that's what humility is. It's the awareness of knowing the difference between valuing a certain asset somebody may have versus valuing the person itself. And there's lots of people who have great skill sets that are not great people. And by that I mean they're they skew towards evil. And what in this context what I mean good versus evil. Evil is doing harm to others to benefit yourself. Whereas good would be helping others which in essence helps yourself. So I mean we we've seen all sorts of politicians and stuff who destroy their own countries and steal from their own people to help themselves. That is an evil person in my book. Right? Uh so there's people who have achieved great success but they've used evil as a primary means of achieving that. So you know like you shouldn't be idolizing somebody or looking up to somebody who does that, right? Uh and I wouldn't say that person is better than you just because they're in a higher position even I feel like they obviously have a lot of deficits in life despite their quote unquote success. Anyhow, those are three virtues that I feel everyone should work on. Confidence, discipline, humility. There's obviously more, but this could take forever. So, I'll just start with those three. If you guys like this type of conversation, let me know and I can expand on it a little bit more.