After an open mat session at my jiu-jitsu gym, I got a missed call from my professor, Arman Fathi. A couple guys had gotten hurt that day, and he wanted to check in, roll together, and see how my movement was holding up.
So I showed up. We rolled until we'd worked up a good sweat, then paused for a break. He asked me, "What are you trying to do? What's your objective?" I gave him a vague answer, because honestly I wasn't sure myself. What he said next rearranged how I thought about the entire sport: "It's not about the end. It's about the journey."
He'd noticed that whenever I went for a submission, I'd hold onto it — committing all my energy into a position long after there was any real path to finishing it. He pointed out how much I wasted chasing one outcome I'd locked myself into. In my determination to force that one technique through, I was missing countless chances to transition, breathe, relax, or find something better entirely.
His advice was to begin every technique from a relaxed state, running the checklist mentally without forcing the physical finish. Privately, I was confused. I remember thinking, what's even the point of jiu-jitsu if I'm not finishing anything?
Then he framed it differently. Say you're flying to Amsterdam to run a 5K. You'd book the flight, arrange the hotel, train hard, and do everything possible to place well. But if you train so hard that winning becomes the only thing you can see, you'll miss the entire city around you — the reason you actually made the trip in the first place. The race matters. It's just not the only thing that matters.
He gave me a challenge: go thirty days without completing a single submission. I was startled, but I agreed to try it. During those thirty days, something loosened in me. I understood, finally, that it was never really about the submission. It was about creating new opportunities through an open mind — staying relaxed, staying patient, and letting go of the one fixed idea of how a roll was supposed to end.
New doors opened as fast as I could let go of the first one I'd been fixated on. I moved more freely between positions, found more transitions, and discovered techniques I'd never have found while white-knuckling one submission attempt. Learning multiplied the moment winning stopped being the only acceptable outcome.
That's the best advice I've ever received in martial arts, and it reshaped how I think about training as a whole — patient, confident, willing to move and transition instead of forcing one fixed outcome. My practice stopped being just exercise and became something closer to a mirror for how I live. When I get too locked onto conquering one specific goal, I go blind to everything else available to me — and some of that is exactly what would've taken me further, if I'd let myself see it.
If this kind of mindset training is something you want to build on the mat instead of just read about, come see what a class looks like.
