I’m thirty-four. And I’ve discovered there are mind-sets that cause me incredible pain, and there are mind-sets that cause me less pain. –David Foster Wallace

The following axiom is something we have all perceived in our training in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, even if we chose to ignore it.

Most of the time Brazilian jiu-jitsu works. Sometimes it does not.

I hope this isn’t a controversial statement. It’s simply a self-evident compound statement: jiu-jitsu works, but sometimes it doesn’t. This does not mean the art is irredeemably flawed. Nor does this mean “the practitioner is never at fault.” Of course it is true “the practitioner doesn’t work” sometimes, hell a lot of the time. However, if we take as an axiom “A practitioner is always at fault,” it means that “BJJ always works, just sometimes the practitioner fails.” To give jiu-jitsu this power, is to give it the status of those EFO, telepathic, yellow-bamboo cult-like martial arts where you can learn to stop a charging human being with a Street Fighter Ryu’s Hadouken pretend fireball. Just keep on trying cause the telepathy works, trust EFO. Jiu-jitsu is not that, it is the farthest thing from that. Jiu-jitsu emphasizes practicality and evolution. It is a constant search for more ways that will improve the art. To admit this evolution-oriented practicality is to admit that sometimes BJJ does not work. Most of the time Brazilian jiu-jitsu works / Sometimes it doesn’t is, therefore, a fundamental axiom of Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

If we take the axiom and think about the diverse types of mind-sets one can have training is it possible to discover a mind-set most ideal for jiu-jitsu?

Like many of my age, I have a seemingly natural affinity for the writing of David Foster Wallace. I teach Wallace in a couple of my courses. What I’ve always admired about his essays is his quest for those places where earnestness and sincerity still exist. He had trouble with the feeling so prevalent in contemporary culture that everything was a game. He found it worrisome that some approached the totality of life with irony, that things were empty of value, and can be appropriated into a meme, showing all is surface. For Wallace, irony and emptiness was a cause of much pain, and his writing often took him to explore places where the real still existed. Unfortunately, oftentimes this meant that he’d find himself in the midst of “fanatics,” those people who have no sense of an outside of the thing they hold so dearly.

So in a continuum where cynics, skeptics, and ironists reside on one end and fanatics on the other, he saw contemporary culture as swinging wildly between the two. He captures a particular dread that he describes in the above book as being something unique to our era. We are bombarded with too much information, we seek too much information, and in the midst of that bombing and exposure, there are good things, like art, occupying a terrifyingly small percentage. The rest is simply entertainment, a word he used to describe a type of cultural product akin to candy, whose main goal is your attention for advertisers. Whether you believe this is the case or not is beside the point of understanding Wallace’s quest for a particular mind-set that could have saved him. (He committed suicide in 2008 at age forty-six.)

I don’t believe that an activity like Brazilian jiu-jitsu can sustain or tolerate an ironic approach to its training or philosophy. Perhaps my imagination is limited, but the only time I see irony is in a comedic sketch where (usually a highly talented) jiu-jiteiro does something like show an “obvious silly technique” to defend a particular choke only to “fake pass out” in its demonstration. Kit Dale, an Australian jiu-jiteiro with Team Checkmat, is well known in the community as an extremely talented grappler but also a prankster and joker whose YouTube videos bring levity to our dreaded 9-5 BJJ-deprived office desks. I bring this up to make the point that an ironic, hipster, mind-set is not a lived-in moment of training nor how you feel about training and the art. There is just too much one is investing in it to be so: monthly dues, physical exertion, injuries, and the constant defeats of your ego (most importantly).

The continuum of possible mind-sets for BJJ practitioners, at least those I’ve trained with here in the Northeast USA seems to start at the hobbyist, then the sincere practitioner, and ending with the fanatic.

Like any subculture, jiu-jitsu is susceptible to the fanatic. They are that certain type who encounters BJJ and believes in it wholeheartedly. They become almost instantaneous evangelicals in their zeal, some become sycophants to their instructor, and, most egregiously, some overly defend jiu-jitsu’s ability to solve any self-defense encounter in ridiculous what if scenarios. They’ll argue the veracity of techniques that disarm an attacker with a semi-automatic handgun; or, they draw heroic and hagiographic biographies of the Gracie family, particularly the founders.

The fanatic and zealot are stages that we all go through. It’s the romantic, honeymoon moment. Most people pass through it. The few that remain zealots, however, develop a particularly harmful mind-set to their training. Most obvious and predictably is the fact that any thing that goes wrong, a loss, is their particular fault, all the time. Depending on their rank, they may beat themselves up after a bad night of rolling. And if this continues, and their self-esteem is not healthy, they begin to avoid rolling, and then class entirely. Soon, they drop out. They’ll post things online about coming back, may return, only to find themselves further behind, get beat-up even more, and they’re lost to jiu-jitsu. Let me be clear, in no way am I stipulating that the art only looses a jiu-jiteiro because their fanaticism places the setbacks squarely on themselves. Obviously, folks leave for many reasons; however, I am trying to show one way the fanatic mind-set is an unhealthy relation to have towards the art. Consequences of this unhealthy mind-set results in 1) again, the person who invariably believes BJJ can defeat an armed opponent, whether a gun or a knife; 2) a person who is not willing to accept changes to the art not thought of by the founders as progress; 3) the bleeding of the art into all aspect’s of one’s identity (dress belts that are ranked like BJJ belts, et al). The latter is a temptation, even for this writer, but jiu-jitsu is neither a religion nor a life philosophy. It includes a philosophical aspect, but in no way can this be instrumental in solving the majority of the problems life throws at you.

A sincere and earnest mind-set, helpful and healthy in life in general, is even more so in BJJ. In addition, it’s the mindset most aligned with the fundamental axiom outlined above. The earnest practitioner understands sometimes jiu-jitsu doesn’t work. They treat the art with the honor and dignity it’s due as, perhaps the most beautifully crafted and useful tool for self-defense, but a tool located in time, nonetheless, that can be improved upon and one that is not capable of fixing everything it encounters. The sincere practitioner understands 1) that size and strength actually does matter, that a new person who’s incredibly fit can walk in and may submit a high blue or low purple depending on that disparity; 2) they understand that a family is as flawed as other families and that origin stories are often mythologized and that some of the time the referral to the origin is a hindrance to the present moment the art finds itself; and (but not limited to) 3) they respect the art enough to understand that it functions within a set of arbitrary rules to maximize it’s reality training base, which means, that there are deficiencies within the art, particularly in the standing grappling portion, and the striking portion. Moreover, the no weapons assumption excludes jiu-jitsu’s claim to any form of real defense against a knife, even more so a gun. We train with certain rules so that we may approach a real fight as closely as possible without risking too much injury from throws or strikes. It is in this, the most sincere approach to jiu-jitsu, where the effectiveness and truth of the art lies. It’s unnecessary to claim more, doing so diminishes jiu-jitsu. Seeing jiu-jitsu for “what it is” is enough to earn its place among the elite martial arts today.

Jiu-jitsu works most of the time. The other time it’s an opportunity to help it and yourself grow.