Talking with a beginner, I remembered how 11 years ago I first stepped onto the tatami. What main rule could I extract from all the experience?
“Paranoidly avoid serious injuries.”
If he follows this rule relentlessly, even in the short term, the beginner will tap out more often than his peers. But with every year, his advantage will compound.
Why?
Others will regularly drop out of training because of moderate or serious injuries, and some will leave the sport altogether. Their path resembles a spawning salmon swimming upstream.
Our beginner, meanwhile, thanks to the cumulatively greater volume of training over the years, will be able to build mastery in the spirit of kaizen: methodically and relentlessly, like a ratchet mechanism.
Interestingly, this empirical rule from grappling echoes a rule from one of the world’s greatest investors, Warren Buffett:
Rule No. 1: Never lose money.
Rule No. 2: Never forget Rule No. 1.
Buffett was not talking about losses in general, but about irreversible losses.
As Nassim Taleb aptly pointed out, if you lose half your capital, you need a 100% return just to get back to where you started.
It turns out that in sports and in business, the growth strategy is unexpected — take care of protecting the Process, and growth will take care of itself.
Sincerely yours,
-Alexander
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