Today all of the gang at Hollywood BJJ got together to watch UFC 80. UFC parties are something of a tradition at Hollywood BJJ. It’s great fun. We all chow on pizza and people bring their friends and significant others. It’s a rare opportunity to hang with your teammates in a social setting.

Anyway, I was pretty stoked for the BJ Penn/Joe Stevenson match and as I expected, it was incredibly exciting. As I have mentioned before in this blog, I’m a big BJ Penn fan and he’s one of the main reasons I follow MMA. For a long time though I was just a couch-potato fan. I followed the BJJ and MMA scenes but I never got onto the mat myself.

That all changed about seven months ago when I had a personal epiphany. Oddly enough, the epiphany occurred at my day-job as a software engineer. My career had stalled and I was feeling overwhelmed and dissatisfied. After many months of misery I realized that the source of my problems was my own lack of humility. I was so confident in my abilities as a software engineer that I was blind to my own deficiencies, and therefore was unable to develop. My career hadn’t stalled because forces had aligned against me, but because my own hubris was preventing me from growing as an engineer and as a human being.

Embracing humility opened a lot of doors for me. It allowed me to see all of the areas that I need to develop and to accept help from others. It allowed me to acknowledge that I can learn from other people and to actively seek their guidance. Last but not least, it allowed me to step onto the mat at Minnesota Martial Arts Academy as a 36 year old and start to roll with guys ten or fifteen years younger than me. As they say, when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. Nowadays I have a little mantra that I invoke many times a day.

Be humble. Have hustle.

I couldn’t help thinking of this during Penn’s post-fight interview when BJ said, “Sean Sherk, you’re dead!” I don’t know what to make of this comment. BJ has earned the right to be confident in his game. Nevertheless, dissing on your opponent smells bad and hides BJ’s true class. I’m forever a BJ Penn fan and I’ll always be inspired by his skill and tenacity. But as I develop my game I need to remind myself that my journey in BJJ began with humility and won’t progress without humility.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 20th, 2008 at 2:11 am and is filed under inspiration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.