All Persons Fictitious

The only way to get smarter is by playing a smarter opponent. — Fundamentals of Chess 1883

I don't start a band because I think I'm good.  I start a band, because I want to get better.

The only way to do that is to play with people better then me.

The "risk" is I might get kicked out of my own band.

That's what I did when I started a rock band a while back.  I found a bassist and a drummer who were better musicians than I was.  They were both good singers, too.

What did I do?

Drilled scales.

Wrote songs.

Jammed with other musicians.

I even got private lessons from an opera singer, who was a fitness instructor at the YMCA.

But, I digress...

I did what I could to get my chops closer to theirs.  I guess it worked, because they never kicked me out.  Still, I never felt like I was as good as they were.

What I Learned from My First Competition in Six Years

Can’t remember where I got that quote from, but once I accepted it, competing in a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu competition for the first time in six years was easy.

Well, relatively speaking...

Somehow I got talked into doing a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu competition in May 2015.  Since the last comp I entered was in 2009, it got me thinking about why it had been so long. I think fear was the primary factor that kept me from competing for so many years.  Fear of not having trained enough was the big one.  There were a few "on the day of" fears, too:

How do I make sure I'm not hungry? (I get hungry every three to four hours.)

What if I'm super tired?

What if I don't get enough sleep the night before?

So, I spun it.

I told myself, that moment right before I step on to the mat to fight...

I will feel like I have not trained enough.

I will be hungry.

I will be tired.

I will not have slept well the night before.

Then, I told myself if I didn’t have any one of those the moment before I stepped on the mat, I was golden.

Another game changer was changing my mindset, or as a friend put it, “going beast mode”.

I’m usually a very nice guy, so I had a very laid back style of sparring.  I mainly played defense, used very little power, and didn’t really care if I submitted my partner or not.

I treated competitions the same way, which meant I didn’t try very hard to get the win.  I essentially told myself, “If I don’t win, it’s O.K.”  As if winning without trying very hard was a good thing.

I now realize that was the wrong mindset to have.

Nobody wants to suck and losing definitely sucks.  But if you want to win, you have to put it all on the line.

So, I turned it up a notch.  I started being way more aggressive in regular training.  I still didn’t use much power, but I really went for the submissions.  At the competition, I was able to find a state of mind where I felt like I had to kill or, at the very least, maim someone.  I kept repeating a line from an episode of Dexter inside my head:

“In a land of predators, the lion never fears the jackal.”

I only had one fight in that competition in May 2015.  I managed to take gold.

Right out of college, I accepted a job as a Product Support Engineer for a commercial air conditioning company in Lexington, KY.

At first you may think “Cantuckee?”, but I’ve been in and out of there my whole life.  My aunt’s been living there for over thirty years, so my family and I would visit in the summers.  When I lived there, two out of three Stateside cousins lived there, too.   Got to know all of my cousin’s kids (six girls, one boy).

Rock climbed on the weekends in the Red River Gorge.  Did a little ice climbing, too.  Started playing more guitar sometime around then in a pseudo-band.  Took vocal lesson from the YMCA fitness coach, who was also an opera singer.

Took up aikido in April 2004.

Read “Angry White Pyjamas” in July 2005 while in Seattle for a business trip.  It was about a British poet who did this 11-month aikido course in Tokyo that was originally developed for the Tokyo Riot Police.  Basically, it was twenty hours of training per week, cleaning the dojo, and push-ups and bunny hops for screwing up.  I remembered finishing the book and thinking, “Man, I wish I had the courage to do that course.”

Born in Tokyo to a father from South Carolina and a Japanese mother.  Actually, I found out after my grandmother (mother’s mother) passed away that she was Korean.  So, that makes me American with German/Scotch-Irish roots and Japanese/Korean.

Lived in Tokyo till 14.  Spent my high school career in Hong Kong.