Caio Terra is one of the most talented and accomplished Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu athletes in the world. He’s achieved his BJJ black belt in only 3 years of training (!) and is a 12x world champion.
How did he accomplish this? The answer is simple, actually – he made the best use of his talent by training as much as he could, whenever he could. For example, back when he just started out, he and his friends destroyed a living room wall (in his mom’s house) so that he could have space to train!

Caio shared the story in an interview for BJJ Eastern Europe:

When I started building the mat space, it was basically because I needed more time to train. I needed time to study and the gym wasn’t always open, plus I was also going to college at the time.

At first, I only had mats in my room. I had a really big room, and I took all of the stuff out of it to the back… I took everything out and just put the mats on. But, eventually, we ran out of room because there were too many people wanting to train with me.
This was because, back in the day, you couldn’t just train with people from the different gym. People would get upset, they would get mad if you did that. And the teachers usually didn’t like that as well. Today, it is more open in regards to that, but back in the day it wasn’t… So, people would come into my house, because my house was not a gym, and then everyone would train with everyone. You could train with your friends and there would be no conflict with the instructors.

But then, a lot of people started coming, including black belt world champions that I would sometimes get a chance to train with. As we all grew, I had to do something about the lack of space. So, I had to take down the walls of my house and to pretty much make all of my house into mat space.
When I asked my mother about it, she wasn’t really in favor of it. She wasn’t living in the house, you know, but she didn’t want me to destroy the house either.

I was trying to convince her. And she was like: „I don’t want to do it, I don’t want to do it.“ I was trying to convince her a lot.
But, there was also this one guy there that was supposed to make the construction. And this guy said: „Oh, this right here is impossible to break. It will take like 2-3 days to break because it is pure cement and brick.“

He continued on to explain what happened next:

So, while I was with my mother in the living room, that guy was just checking out the walls in my room, which connected to the mentioned living room. I almost convinced my mother – she was saying: „Okay. Maybe next week I’ll get my stuff out and the TV out and couch and especially my paintings out of the walls, and only then you might be able to do it. But not right now, not today. You can take that guy out of there because we need to think it through. Just give me some time and I will get everything out.“

And as I’m finally convincing her, the guy is telling my friends in the other room that it is impossible to break the walls and that he’s just going to give it a shot. He wanted to show my friends that the wall is too thick and that it is never going to break. And as he gives that one try, the whole wall comes down! (Laughs) And it destroys everything in the living room!

My mother’s paintings, the TV, the table… (Laughs) The wall came down and the bricks destroyed everything in their way. There was so much dust everywhere and everything was pretty much wasted. After that, my mother left the house being really, REALLY upset with me and didn’t even want to talk to me..
But, on my own end, I just wanted to try it out. And he was trying to prove to my friends that the wall was too thick – and it truly wasn’t. (Laughs)

Make sure to read the entire interview with Caio Terra here.