Very often, we see leaders lose sight of how they got to where they are: by being and thinking differently from the competition. They make it to first place, and then their thinking changes from seeking innovation to seeking the status quo. They think, I made it to first place, so now I must not change a thing. But change is what got them to the top in the first place! This is because they’re focused on the positive result rather than on the process of success.
Innovation is why there are still human beings on the planet. The wheel, the plow, the harnessing of fire; religion, atheism, logic, mysticism; the longbow, gunpowder; modern medicine, the car, computer chips—the world is a constant reminder of the impact of innovation, whether through physical tools or intellectual theories or movements.
The history of war, for example, proves again and again that innovations are usually the deciding factor in battle. But this shouldn’t be confused with inspiration: inspiration might be the initial idea or seed of the idea in a person’s mind. Innovation means putting whatever the idea is through a process, checking results, using it in specific situations.
This is no different from my approach to fighting and the octagon, which is, in fact, my “battlefield.” You can’t simply enter and beat someone on instinct; you can’t go in with the same approach over and over because it worked last time. Nowadays, every camp has access to video footage and has roughly the same technical tools as the opponent. The difference in success comes in the carefully planned innovation. You must change things up—not just keep them fresh, but progress. Your strategy might come as a surprise to the opponent, critics or fans, but in reality it has been well researched, learned and trained to a point that this innovation can then give way to inspiration.
Professional fighting, and mixed martial arts in particular, offers one of the least stable environments in terms of the sporting world. A fight is absolute, total, surreal chaos. The results fluctuate, and there are no safe returns in MMA, except winning.
All of my innovations are absolutely efficiency based. I take the risk of innovating, of building upon a winning formula to avoid becoming stale or complacent and, above all, to rise to the ever-changing challenge before me. If change is constant in the world, it must be for all individuals too.
MENTOR: My being almost a decade older than Georges really helped both of us. I was able to help him avoid the mistakes I’d made, and he was open to accepting my word as bond. I explained in painstaking detail all the stupid things I did and mistakes I’d committed that had slowed or even harmed me, and I think it helped protect him from the same things.
I never had a family, for example, so if I didn’t fight, I didn’t eat. This means that I often fought injured, and I shouldn’t have. He never had to do that, he never had to fight injured to earn a square meal. He couldn’t have and I wouldn’t let him. Together, we could live day to day but keep an eye on the bigger, more important life goals. My mentality was this: I did what I had to do in my time, but Georges I would treat like my little brother and protect him from my numerous mistakes.
One day, when Georges had been progressing nicely and attracting attention from professional fight promoters, Pete Spratt of the UFC came to Montreal. One of his goals was to have a good look at Georges, and people knew it. But Georges had hurt his knee in training, and despite this, he wanted to fight anyway. He wanted to make an impression. Both Georges and I were supposed to fight, and both of us were hurt, and I was going to fight anyway to make some money. He told me: “You’re hurt and you’re fighting anyway, so why wouldn’t I? Why can’t I be a warrior like you?” I tried to explain that I had to fight because I had no other choice. It was not about being a warrior, it was about choice.
It was a tough time. Georges had borrowed money from his mother and he wanted to pay her back. But I knew that we could fix those things. We could pool our money—that wasn’t the issue. Everybody wanted Georges to fight that day, to get a shot at the big money, at the pros, but we had to keep our focus on the future.
I finally canceled my fight, out of solidarity with him. It was the dream day for a kid wanting to go to the UFC, but he didn’t fight that day, either. We chose to wait. I’ll never forget it: Georges had a tear in his eye. He felt bad and he sensed a chance was flying away. But I was sure that Spratt would come back another time. I explained to Georges that those people telling him to fight were people who had lost a major battle in their own lives, and weren’t reconciled with it yet. They had no idea how their wishes were actually working against his better interests. They had had their one chance and they had missed it, and so they believed Georges couldn’t miss this one. They were forecasting their regret onto his life.
But I told Georges: “You must not fight today. This way, you will fight another day.” We waited. We waited, and it worked.
Kristof is an excellent fighter in his own right, one who could have been world champion, but while he’s great at giving advice, to some he’s not always as good at receiving it. Yet he lives his life his way, and I respect that.
MENTOR: My reasons for testing Georges were simple: I’d explain to Georges that experience comes from the dojo and nowhere else. We didn’t want our first real test to be on television; we wanted it to be right there in the dojo, every single day. That way, when he’d actually have to go out and fight in public, we’d both know whether or not he’d be truly ready. It wasn’t always easy, and sometimes we disagreed, but not often, and I usually won the discussion and got the last word.
It’s very nice for me to be talking about fear and how it becomes powerful for you, but the consequence of facing your own fear is risk. Risk is unpredictable. If risk were predictable, every single investor in stocks or bonds would be a billionaire, and that’s just not the case. What risk means is that sometimes, when you face your own fear, you may not win right away. You may struggle, and that means going backward. Or losing.
Without risk, though, there is no real reward; there’s only luck, and I’m not planning on rolling the dice to decide the rest of my life. When I went to New Mexico to train with Greg Jackson before my second fight against Matt Serra, I was going out of my element completely and was taking risks on a number of levels. There was personal risk, because a lot of my local people were hurt that I was looking outside the usual borders for help. There was also professional risk, because down there I was just another guy in the gym, a small fish in a bigger pond.
When I announced to the media that I was about to have major surgery and be out of action for eight months, I took some really big risks. First of all, I said that belts don’t matter to me, and that’s risky because the people at the UFC have structured their whole business around belts. Second, I promised my fans that I wouldn’t let them down and that I’d be world champion again. I promised them, in fact. That’s a big risk.
The key for me, at this point in my life, is that I’ve climbed back up the mountain twice to regain my title. I know and understand what it takes to get back to that level. That’s why I can take that kind of risk.
So what happens in life is that, as you grow and improve in whatever field you choose, so does the size of your challenges. So grows the size of the problems you can face and solve. Just two or three years ago, it wouldn’t have been realistic to take that kind of risk. But now I feel it is me and me alone.
Risk comes in all shapes and colors: bankruptcy, heartbreak, failure. The alternative is a world without risk, without color, without knowing if you could have made that business work, if she would have truly loved you, if you would have finished that race or project or garden or painting or triathlon or . . . whatever. If, in other words, is risk’s purgatory. I know I don’t want to spend any time there.
It was my decision to make that announcement about regaining my title during my rehabilitation. I have a great team around me, and before that press conference we talked about the right things to say and how to say them, and what the right angle was and how to reassure people that everything was going
to be okay. And that was very helpful to me, but when it came to stating, for me and my fans, that I would regain my title, that was my call alone because I’m the only person who 1) could truly feel it, and 2) has the right to say it.
The key to facing fear and taking risk is to start small. Get some practice and you’ll discover you get better at facing fear. A really easy example is poker. A lot of people say they’re good poker players, but if they understand anything at all about risk, they’ll be very careful whose table they sit down at for a game, and how much money is at stake.
So what we’re starting to understand here is that breaking down fear and evaluating risk is a step-by-step process.
MENTOR: For months, I continued to test Georges and forced him to fight in the dojo before anything else. I’d say to him, “Here’s what’s going to happen—you’ll come here tomorrow at this specific time, and other people will come too expecting a fight, and the one who has more capacity will win, and he will rise.” I knew all along that the one who’d rise would be Georges, but he didn’t know that. As for the other ones, unfortunately for them, they were bait. None of these people had the potential to become great champions. In no case did they have the potential, even though they looked very impressive, knocking fighters out on television. But a knockout is a deceptive thing, especially on a television screen. People fighting on TV, you don’t see everything about them. But I’d fought with and trained all those people, I’d felt them and been around them, and only Georges stood out in my mind, in my gut. I’d lecture him, “Even that guy you saw on television, well, it’s not reality. It’s TV. You must discover the reality about that guy, and it’s that you are more powerful than him.”
Georges just didn’t have any choice. He’d get to the gym and see St-Louis there waiting for him, and he couldn’t turn around. He couldn’t leave, even if he wanted to.
Kristof and his partner, Stephan Potvin, massacred me for years. I felt every kind of pain imaginable, and more. I discovered places that could hurt that I didn’t know existed. I understood what it means to be taken to the brink, to the limit. I survived some fantastically crazy stuff.
I’d get to the gym and I’d see Jason St-Louis on the mat, and he was waiting for me. I was seventeen years old! And yes, I was scared to death. But I also knew I needed to do this, I needed to pass these tests and understand that Kristof wouldn’t let me get seriously hurt. Sometimes, he even had people waiting for me—it was totally nuts. He never told me ahead of time.
There were definitely times when I thought Kristof was crazy, and when I thought I was going to get my butt kicked. But I was sure it was part of his plan, so I needed to trust him and follow my instincts. I knew he wanted to grow my confidence.
MENTOR: Yet, it was totally out of the question that we’d go out to Las Vegas for a cage fight without a clue as to what he could really do. We were surrounded by pretenders and big talkers who were constantly predicting how their own careers would flourish on the big stage. And we ignored them, choosing the dojo as the defining place, the first stage.
We got to a point where we spent every moment of the day together—not only training together, but living in the same room together on these tiny beds in Georges’s parents’ basement. We shared a room, two small beds in the basement. We’d get up and go to the gym for some weightlifting and cardio—not all the stuff we do today. Then, later in the morning, we’d eat and talk about our training, and then we’d go to my gym in Montreal and practice Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and wrestling and other fighting disciplines, and then we’d go to our little beds and rest for a while, and then we’d go and eat some more. Later on, as the day progressed, we’d go to the local sports stadium in St-Isidore. In the winter, we’d wrap our feet in plastic bags and go running in the snow, around the track in fifty centimeters of slush. We just didn’t care. We’d time ourselves, run like crazy, run like horses, in the dark around the track. We thought it was the right thing to do. We’d get home and finally we’d have no energy left, we were running on empty, so we’d jump into the ice-cold water outside in the above-the-ground pool, convinced it was good for our muscles (which it turns out it was). The water on some days had to be minus-2 or 3, and we’d break through a thinnish layer of ice, and we’d stay in for as long as we could.
Kristof stuck by me and was with me at the lowest: sweatpants, a thick winter coat, something to protect our faces from the frostbiting wind, a toque and a track in the dark, snow and slush halfway up our shins. I slept like a baby those nights. It’s thanks to Kristof. He became like my big brother. We’re like a family. He can walk into my house at any time and it’s his house. My fridge is his fridge.
MENTOR: His dad was convinced we had totally lost our minds. He’d say to me, “Tabarnak, mon fils peut pas faire ça!”—Christ, my son can’t do that! And I’d reply that his son was strong and that he’d be a champion and he had no reason to worry. I spent months talking with Georges’s dad. Every day, we’d talk and I’d go on about how I believed his son would be a champion. Neither he nor anyone else believed me—people just thought we were nuts. But I told him that if I was wrong, I’d be nothing but a buffoon. Everything we were doing just felt good and right.
The first time I told my dad I wanted to be world champion in mixed martial arts, he thought I was nuts. It was my dream, sure, but everything begins with a dream, and it felt real inside my head. It was hard to talk about, and harder for others to understand or visualize. But I’ve always had premonitions, feelings and visions that felt like they belonged to me and me alone. Like the future sometimes takes place inside my head.
But this isn’t a good thing if the future looks bleak. The loss to my hero Matt Hughes, for example. I saw it. From the stare-down, where I couldn’t look at him and averted my eyes to the rafters. I’d lived the events inside my head long before the fight. I believed deep inside of me that I’d be champion someday, but I also felt this wasn’t the right time.
The importance of the feeling, though, is that it put me on a path. Luckily, I know that each journey begins with one step, and is followed by another.
MENTOR: The trick was accepting progress in small increments—a little bit at a time. He had to realize it. It’s how he proved himself. He knew I was testing him, he knew what I was doing, but he never refused a fight. He comes from true, legitimate martial arts. He never said no and turned away. He did say, on a few occasions, “Wow, Kristof, that guy is really strong. Are you sure I should be fighting him?” And I’d tell him that if he didn’t face and beat that guy today, there was no point in doing any of this. This wasn’t the big time, it was just a step and he had to do it. He had to; it was an obligation.
One of the lessons I learned in all those years of practicing karate is that progress only comes in small, incremental portions. Nobody becomes great overnight. Nobody crams information if he wants to be able to use it over the long term.
Confucius said: “Tell me and I’ll forget. Show me and I’ll remember. Involve me and I’ll understand.” I love that quote, and I’m lucky to have had teachers throughout my career who understood new ways of involving me in learning.
It’s like the concept of kaizen. Kaizen is the Japanese philosophy of continuous, slow improvement. It’s about finding smarter ways of working instead of just harder ways of working. I’m definitely not an expert on kaizen, not in the least. But Rodolphe Beaulieu, a very close friend and my old Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu training partner, keeps telling me that I am living the life of kaizen, that I invented my career by following the kaizen path. He describes it like this:
Kaizen is a little bit like the white-belt mentality. You listen to what everybody around you says about a subject, any subject, and from those opinions you form your own and take the best solution-path possible. You don’t have to think of everything, because a great idea can come from anywhere. There are two kinds of suggestion boxes: the ones that are opened and the suggestions are read, and the ones that are opened so the opinions can be to
ssed aside, unread.
One example, dieting, is probably the place where I see the least kaizen thinking. We all know people who spend two or three months essentially starving themselves to lose weight—only to gain most of it back with a couple of binge sessions. But there are much better ways of taking on a mission. Don’t think of the mountain, think of the first thousand steps. Think of the low-hanging fruit.
This is incredibly important because a great physical journey is only possible if your mentality is nourished with positive energy. It’s going to feel good to reach that first plateau, and what happens is that the second plateau is even easier to reach, and more gratifying. Performance improves. Results are tangible. Your mind and your body feel better and are finally working in harmony.
In other words, when you prepare a list of improvements and you make them small and achievable, you won’t just stick to them, you’ll increase the chances that you’ll keep going forward.
Another point of view that relates to this approach comes from a samurai named Yamamoto Tsunetomo. In his classic samurai manifesto Hagakure, he writes: “Matters of great concern should be treated lightly. Matters of small concern should be treated seriously.”
In other words, when you pay attention to detail, the big picture will take care of itself. The way I see it, details are everywhere and in everything people say. Ninety-nine opinions are one better than ninety-eight—but only if you’re listening to everything people express. In the past five years, for example, my arm bar has gotten better. It was pretty good when I started my career, but now it’s a much better, smarter weapon because I’ve kept on trying to improve it.
Since Rodolphe is a good old friend of mine, I’ve tried to understand why he sees kaizen in what he calls my “way.” What do I see? I see a lot of people working themselves harder than they ever have, but without any chance of obtaining the desired result. And that’s because of their overall approach.
The Way of the Fight Page 6