How to Succeed in Martial Arts?

“Success is a Journey, not a Destination”, thats what Bruce Lee said while ago and it is still in my head today. For a long time, I was always confused by what it means. I never knew what it means until recently, and thats because I am a Bruce Lee fan.

During around my 2 decades of learning, practicing and teaching martial arts, just like anyone else, there is always ups and down in those aras (teaching, training, etc). Especially learning many different arts and realizing that performance is my main incentive, setbacks in achieving goals always happen. The events of winning and losing in achieving goals and feeling like a failure and success happens even more when I started to learn martial arts such as Brazilian Jiujitsu, Grappling in general and Kickboxing.

I started to learn BJJ because I met a friend of mine named Howard in Monterey, California. I had always been interested to learn BJJ due to Royce Gracie in the UFC, but that time in New York, I could not find any BJJ schools and that instructional videos were so expensive. When I studied in Monterey, I met Howard. He was a Hawaian Japanese heritage guy and very muscular and athletic. He was wearing aBJJ t-shirt and I came to him and introduced myself. I asked him about BJJ and finally I sparred him in someone’s yard and he destroyed me. After that, I went to UC Irvine in Los Angeles for his tournament, where he was under Cesar Gracie. There, he introduced me to Garth Taylor who was a purple belt at that time under later my first BJJ instructor, Claudio Franca.

Fast forward, in BJJ, in the beginning, my goal was to get a blackbelt. Then I realize that it was a long hard process to do that because proficiency in this art is striclty due to performance. Can you really fight under pressure against skilled resisting opponents?

There were many times in my martial arts career that I wanted to quit, but I persevere because I am the kind of person that want to have mastery on something once my mind is set to acquire skills. I realize that when I focus on my failures on not achieving my small goals, it’s just made me more miserable and not wanting to train and get better. Not wanting to spar against people that can give me a hard time because I might look bad. One of my teacher, Prof Niko Han told me that,” don’t ever let your BJJ demon takes you”.

Fortunately, I changed. With the help and advice from my teacher at that time, Rodney King, I started to train often again, challenging myself by many practice and sparring against those that can give me a hard time. I started to just focus on myself on how to get better daily without worrying much about the outcome. As long as I continually making progress towards my ultimate goal, which is now to be the best martial arts coach that I can be to help people overcome obstacles, I know that I am already successful.

So, my view on defining success changed from just achieving goals into having continous journey going forward in achieving the bigger ultimate goal. I saw many talented people in martial arts and other areas who could become of the greats, but they quit because they feel like a failure when they did not achieve one of their mini goals. As I experience and study under many successful artists, I found that the critical factor that made them great is because they continously in their journey in learning and practicing their arts towards mastery. I think, that is how to succeed in martial arts and that’s what Bruce Lee meant by “ Success is a journey, not a Destination”.