by Urijah Faber
My professional achievements are a matter of public record, and as someone who has defended world championships—small ones like King of the Cage, big ones like WEC—over an extended period of time, I’m often questioned about pressure and expectations. What’s next? Who’s next? In that context, it can be difficult to explain the way I live my life. Having a belt or a title is not what defines me. Being a public figure and getting recognized as I walk through an airport or eat in a restaurant has changed how other people define me, but not how I define myself. I define myself by my actions, work ethic, and my morals. I live for my supportive family and friends who have helped sculpt my persona and identity.
So, don’t only set goals like “Salesperson of the Year” or “Employee of the Month.” Short-term achievements are great, but can cloud the issue and get in the way of the bigger purpose. They also establish external forces—bosses, clients, etc.—as judges of your achievements. When artificial achievements become the journey and the destination, you run the risk of losing control of your passion. In other words, if I had been unable to get the 250-pounder out of bounds—which would have been a failure by statistical standards—I like to think Coach Fowler would still remember the incident as an example of what I was all about.
The 5th Law of Power
Know Yourself
The decision to pursue wrestling in college was easy. In fact, you might say it was made for me. I was a good high-school football player. By my senior season I was an all-league cornerback and the third back in our Wing-T offense, but in the back of my head I always knew that no matter how much I loved football, it was never going to love me back in quite the same way. For a five-foot-five-and-a-half-inch 135-pounder, a future as a Division I football player was not impossible, yet not very likely either. But wrestling . . . wrestling was different. In this sport, I didn’t need to hear someone else’s thoughts on what was important, and a hundred pounds on a lesser athlete wasn’t going to negate my hard work and grit.
Everyone has talents, but you can’t be creative without a degree of self-knowledge that sometimes comes with a dose of brutal honesty about your talents. We all know people who have delusions about themselves. I’m not talking about “clinical” delusions, just, well, socially acceptable ones. The guy who thinks all the women love him, the woman who thinks she can be Miss America (despite all empirical evidence to the contrary), the old man who thinks he can go into a bar and beat up anybody forty years younger.
I had to understand the reality of my talents and how they matched up with my passion. The team nature of football was better suited to my personality, but wrestling was better suited to my mentality and physical talents, and so I threw myself into the sport with all-out zeal. I loved the individual nature of the sport, the one-on-one aspect of the competition.
I read whatever books I could lay my hands on and watched every instructional video I could find until the tape was worn out. I was determined to work harder than anybody else every day at practice. I not only watched college and Olympic wrestlers but I studied their habits and demeanor. I felt there were secrets locked inside those people, and if I learned their best attributes I would have an advantage over those competitors who didn’t.
And I adopted Dan Gable, the great University of Iowa and Olympic wrestler, as one of my heroes. (Little did I know I would later be fortunate enough to break bread with Gable and have some one-on-one conversations with him.) I saw the fierce but quiet confidence he exuded when he stepped onto the mat, and I knew that his demeanor had an effect on the wrestlers who were faced with the task of competing against him.
Like Gable, I loved to compete, and I would contend that I needed to compete. Competition was like a drug for me. I loved looking into the eyes of my opponent and thinking about all the preparation that had gone into the moment. I loved the immediacy of the contest, and how it could turn one way or another in an instant.
There is a difference between creativity and self-delusion. Football, for the reasons described above, wasn’t the best path for me to follow. Creativity comes after you have established your sense of purpose and are prepared to attack it with a positive attitude. You have to be realistic about your abilities. Shoot higher without being delusional. I don’t plan on winning a jump ball against Shaquille O’Neal, but could I maybe play in the NBA? Who knows—Spud Webb did and he was barely an inch taller than me. Could Spud Webb have taken his talent and hard work into the Octagon as professional fighter? I’m almost positive he would believe that he could.
Shoot for the stars when you attack your passions, but give yourself every advantage to get there. Find your strengths and conquer your weaknesses.
The 6th Law of Power
Work Harder and Smarter (Stumbling vs. Planning)
There was very little wrestling history at Lincoln High School, so I wanted to create it. I arrived early and stayed late. The fitness aspect of sports never scared me—I loved to work out—but moderation wasn’t one of my trademarks at this point.
So during my sophomore year, I had what I thought was a great idea. I was going to run to school in the morning. This would allow me to get in an extra workout, help me stay ahead of the competition. Wrestling had become a serious pursuit for me by this time, and as I’ve said, I approached it the way I did everything else in my life: with intent to win. I saw this running idea as a way of separating myself from the average wrestler—of doing just a little bit more than was expected of me.
We lived out in the country, a good distance from school; but “it’s pretty far” was about as scientific as I got with my planning. I knew it took my mom fifteen or twenty minutes to drive to school but that was about as far as my research went.
When the appointed day arrived for me to embark on my journey, I made arrangements to have my backpack dropped off at school. I told my parents I would not be taking the bus.
So far, so good.
Since I didn’t know the number of miles I would be running, I didn’t have a good idea of how long it would take me to get to my destination. I had built this day up in my mind as epic—the day I would do something nobody else would even attempt—and the enormity of the feat led me to set my alarm for four-thirty. I wanted to make sure I left myself enough time, sure, but it was more than that: Something like this called for true sacrifice, not only in the running but in the amount of pain I would inflict on myself by getting up at this ungodly hour.
I got out of bed as soon as the alarm rang and headed outside to test the weather. The predawn winter air was brisk, so I dressed accordingly. Long johns, sweatpants, thermal long-sleeved undershirt, and sweatshirt, and capped it off—literally—with a beanie.
At four forty-five, I was out the door and running down the dirt driveway, ready for my big adventure. I was probably less than half a mile into the run when I realized I was seriously overdressed. Rivulets of sweat trickled down my back and beads began forming on my forehead.
Off came the sweatshirt, which I tied around my waist.
A few strides later I yanked the beanie off my head and crammed it into the pocket of my sweatpants.
I was in excellent shape for a sophomore in high school, and before long I found myself in a good running groove. Despite being weighed down by the extra clothes, I was on a good pace.
Too good, as it turned out.
My “long run” turned out to be nine miles, and my lack of planning caused me to arrive at school more than two hours before my first class, half undressed, clothes tied around my waist, stuffed into my pockets, and crumpled up in my hands.
It was not even six o’clock in the morning, and I was at school. I probably could have run back home, taken a shower, and still caught the bus.
This was an exaggerated case of poor planning. I didn’t use any tools to calculate how long the run was, or the amount of time it would take for me to complete it. When I tested the morning weather and found it
chilly, I didn’t account for the heat my body would generate while running for more than an hour.
The run taught me a lesson: Passion without a plan is incomplete. It’s great to be motivated and want to do more, but you want to be smart in your pursuit.
As I got older and wiser, I came to see this story as a parable of preparation. There are plenty of people out there with goals, people who desperately want to achieve something great. They have the passion to put those goals into motion. They aren’t afraid to work for it. But too many people fall into the trap I call “Stumbling vs. Planning.” My run to school was the perfect example of stumbling. I thought I had it planned, but my passion had blinded me to the importance of planning. I was stumbling, forced to make sense of it as I went along. To put your passion to work, you have to plan it out. There are going to be twists along the way, as we’ve seen in chapters 2 and 3 about persistence and creativity. But if you approach your passion with a realistic plan, you’ll put yourself in a far better position to succeed—and succeed quickly. The less time you spend fixing problems after the fact, like wondering what you’re going to do with the two hours before school, the more time you’ll have to work on your passion.
If you don’t plan, you’ll end up in the same position as a fifteen-year-old Urijah Faber. You won’t know where or how to start, and you won’t understand the nuances of the old saying Where there’s a will there’s a way.
Possessing the will is important, but being smart in your pursuit will allow you to accomplish and achieve more.
The 7th Law of Power
Push Through Life’s Hiccups (Dealing with Change)
I want to tell you the story of my brother, Ryan. It’s not an easy story for me to tell. Ryan is two years older than me, and he’s always been my hero. Our relationship was forged through a shared experience: the days and nights with our dad in the motor home, going back and forth between our mom and dad’s places, being each other’s rock during a bad divorce. My days watching in admiration as Ryan played high school football and wrestled. I remember when he started freshman football and I was in sixth grade, I would wake up each morning, fill a jug with ice-cold water, and ride my bike to the summer conditioning practice. I’d show up to watch the end of his practices, just in time to see him finish with the lead group on all the runs. He didn’t have the best physique or style as a freshman in high school, but he was the hardest-working guy out there, and he led by example.
When I was a freshman in high school, he was a senior and the captain of the football and wrestling teams. He was a peer counselor in athletics. He was on the student council. He took all the available AP and honors courses, was fluent in Spanish after just three years of taking courses, he was off the charts in math. He had to take math classes at the junior college as early as his junior year because they didn’t have a teacher at school who was at his level. Ryan never smoked, never drank, and as the MC brought spirit into all the pep rallies at school. I know there’s no such thing as the perfect kid, but he came as close as humanly possible to fitting the definition.
He was so good, in fact, that I never wanted to let him know whenever I did anything bad. I wasn’t a bad kid, but you have to understand Ryan. He was wall-to-wall good, and he had very little tolerance for missteps. I drank some in junior high and tried weed as an eighth grader, and I knew if Ryan caught wind of it there would be hell to pay. Besides, I didn’t want to disappoint him.
Ryan was accepted into Cal Polytechnic in San Luis Obispo after he graduated from high school, but he decided to take the air force ROTC scholarship he was awarded and attend Citrus Community College near Los Angeles. It was all planned out: Ryan would attend Citrus, near my grandparents on my mother’s side, for two years, and then transfer to Azusa Pacific University. After graduation, he would go on to become an air-force pilot.
Ryan was incredibly organized for a young man, and left nothing to chance. He had a job working in a Nordstrom’s café in Sacramento (he would commute thirty minutes from Lincoln), and before he left for Southern California, he contacted the Nordstrom’s closest to the campus and managed to transfer his job to that store. Then, at eighteen, scholarship and job in tow, Ryan moved to Los Angeles. He rented a room from a family in the area, went to school, and worked.
During his first year, he would come home for holidays. Though we noticed that he was getting more into our family’s early roots of Christianity, it didn’t set off any alarms in our family; Ryan was eight when we left the Christian commune, so he had a stronger religious education than I did. (I was five.) He got all As and continued to be the responsible, upstanding guy we all knew. But when he came back for the summer after his first year in college, I noticed serious changes. His beliefs were becoming more fanatical. It’s not just seemingly innocuous stuff like the fact that he wouldn’t check out girls like he used to—which to me was alarming—now he was getting up at four-thirty every morning to read his Bible.
Ryan doesn’t do anything halfway, and we knew that he had become a member of the International Church of Christ (Boston Movement). It wasn’t until later that we found out this Church of Christ is one of the fastest-growing and most destructive cults in America. Time magazine did a story on them, as did television information programs such as A Current Affair, a popular news show at that time. This group recruits almost exclusively on college campuses, and it uses young, good-looking people to do the recruiting. They target people like Ryan who are idealistic and away from home for the first time.
There is a big emphasis on fun activities, but the real push is to increase your monetary and time commitment to the church. In addition to the financial requests, each member was assigned to a group of peers with a “discipler,” a person in charge, to keep him in line on his commitment to the International Church of Christ’s interpretation of the Bible. He was expected to report to this person regarding every aspect and decision in his life. They twisted scriptures to encourage eating less, sleeping less, and giving more money to the church, even if you didn’t have it—they didn’t care if you were a young college student trying to make ends meet. Guilt was a major tool in the church’s arsenal to control its members, so they went to great lengths to get members to tell anything and everything about their current self and their past and exaggerated “the sinfulness” of what they were coerced into sharing. Kip McKean, the leader of the group, saw to it that his disciplers were collecting everyone’s money while (we are told) he and his family were living a lavish lifestyle in Malibu, apparently thanks to the devotion of his followers.
I had only just completed my sophomore year in high school when Ryan was first involved, and as time went on I began to see him getting more and more wrapped up in this church. I remember, during my junior year, questioning Ryan’s thought process when he was home for Christmas. He had been praying for me to find a relationship with the Lord, which I guess I could understand, but he also told me he had been including our grandparents in his prayers. Our grandparents were immigrants from Holland and were about as devoted Christians as can be. They were part of the resistance during World War II and hid Jewish families in their home, which nearly cost them their lives, but helped save the lives of those families. My grandfather, Gerard Faber, was a music professor at Asbury Christian College in Kentucky, as well as the organist at his church. My grandmother, Gerry Faber, had her own seat reserved in the front row at church, and I’ve yet to receive a holiday, birthday card, or a phone call from them without a biblical quote or religious inspiration at the end.
Needless to say, the alarms went off when Ryan was extremely worried that my grandparents were going to hell because they weren’t following the Bible the right way, like his church. I remember laughing hard at Ryan and saying, “Dude, are you being serious?” It was apparent that he was, even after I used my best logic and sarcasm to paint a picture of how crazy he was being. The conversation ended with Ryan frustrated, a little stumped, but holding on
to his faith as he believed it was the only truth.
A few months later he took my entire family to one of his church’s group baptisms in Sacramento, which was being held in a banquet room at the Hilton. Ryan didn’t know anyone at the church (his group was in LA, the LAICC) but you couldn’t tell. He walked in and, as a member of the church, was greeted like a family member. A man got up on the stage and began preaching about his relationship with a girl. He started out by saying their relationship was originally only about sex, and it got a little graphic. It was really odd and uncomfortable. Even my grandparents—who had been excited about Ryan’s born-again Christianity—were so disturbed that they walked out. When I pointed this out to Ryan, he told me, “They were convicted.”
Roughly six months after the meeting—on New Year’s Eve 1997 to be exact—with Ryan one class shy of getting his AA degree and moving on to Azusa Pacific, my parents got a phone call from his boss at Nordstrom. His boss said, “I know this is not any of my business, but if he was my child, I would want to know. Ryan hasn’t been showing up for work on time, and when he does, he acts strange. He’s losing weight—we can’t get him to eat when he is here—he will rarely talk, and doesn’t smile. He walks around with his head down, and isn’t able to perform his job duties as before. Even his regular customers are noticing and commenting. You know Ryan, he is always so fun and bubbly, joking around and making people laugh—he is no longer himself.”