“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”.

How do we become good at fighting? What martial arts that are good for self defense? How do I make sure that I master these arts and can perform under pressure?

These are some of questions that bother me for a long time. Being bullied as I grow up, I was in few school fights. There were different types of fights that I experience: there were fights where I was bullied and been attacked by few guys in a toilet, other fights were kind of like gladiators where after school secretly we would go to a secluded park and fought between 2 guys like gladiators, there were also fights between schools, these are the worst. Due to something simple like a basketball match where one school’s team lost and it turned out into an all out brawl. The participants were usually bring some things to throw such as rocks. They also sometimes bring knives, a Japanese Katana sword and bunch of sharp objects. Students do get killed sometimes. And when the police arrived, some of these kids were thrown into jails.

Luckily I always shied away from the schools fight, but not other fights. I saw my friends were in a school fights before and that raised many questions. When I took up Tae Kwon Do and trained seriously for few years until I got my black belt, I always ask ed myself: how can I use this in a real fight? What if the guy was too close and used punching? What if I fell and we grappled on the ground? Then it happened, I did fought in high school and lost. After I kicked him several times, he was just ran into me with punches and tackled me. He mounted me and punched me until I gave up.

All these questions were answered when I discovered Jeet Kune Do in New York. I took private lessons and studied the arts and the philosophies of Bruce Lee. I understand that there are 4 ranges in fighting: kicking, punching, clinching and grappling. It was here in Jeet Kune Do that I started to discover success formula for martial arts training. So I knew at that time that I had to invest to study martial arts for for those ranges such as Savate, Thai Boxing, Boxing, Wing Chun, Wrestling and Grappling. As I continued the training in JKD at that time, there were few JKD instructors who only used Bruce Lee principled, but they did not do exacly like what Bruce Lee did in terms of techniques. They said, it is because everything is evolved and we as martial artists need to evolve as well.

Few of these instructors had been taking Brazilian Jiujitsu at that time before the UFC in 1993. There were blue and purple belts at that time. From them I found the ultimate formula for success in my martial arts training, which are: Learning new technique or information, sparring them in isolation and later sparring them in integration. From there, just repeat the process like creating a deep well in each range.

Thats what I do ever since. In grappling, I would learn let say how to hold someone in the mount position and also how to escape in these positions. Then I would spar them in isolation, just within the realm of mount position and escapes from mount with no strikes and no submissions. Once I am confident, I slowly add strikes and submissions and how to defend them.

I do the samet thing in striking arts, in boxing, after learning let say how to jab and defend, I would spar only jab versus jab. Other times would be boxing versus kicking or kickboxing versus wrestling and as well as full all out MMA sparring as integration process before we repeat it again. Off course, what I mentioned here were just a surface of what I do and what I teach to my clients, there were still other elements of tools and timing development for each art, but I hope you get the idea.

If you are interested to know more on how I can help you gain confidence, mastery and achieve your goal fasters by using martial arts experience and methodologies, please give me a call at +628170116098 or click https://www.timetrade.com/book/JYTKJ