Not a lot of people can say that they knew what they wanted to do back in their teenage days… Heck, a lot of us even today don’t know what we want to do! Let alone back when we were 15 or 16 years old – unlike Cole Abate.
Abate won the ADCC Trials as a 16 year-old blue belt. The young prodigy’s success becomes clearer, however, when you realize that he knew that he wanted to become a professional BJJ athlete since he was 8 years old!

In a recent conversation with the BJJ Fanatics, Abate shared how he matured faster as a by-product of BJJ training:

I think that, growing up, I was already a little more mature than the kids I was around at school. And I think a lot of that comes from me being surrounded by experienced adults. Especially when I started training Jiu-Jitsu, because soon enough [after starting] I was training in the adult class; I was surrounded by the adults in the class and I was one of the only few kids training.

So, I would do that class at night. And I remember just hanging out after class and being around everyone else, and making friends like that. So, my best friends weren’t the kids at school – it was the guys I was hanging out in the gym after class, or when we went out to eat after class…

He knew that he wanted to commit to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu back when he was just 8 years old:

So I think that, whenever I’d go back to school… I think I was 8 or 9 when I really started committing myself to Jiu-Jitsu. And I’d go to school, knowing that my path was with Jiu-Jitsu.
I obviously knew that I wanted to have a good education and stuff, to open up my own academy one day, or open up my own business… And work within the sport.

Most people don’t know what they’re going to do when they’re 7, 8, 9 years old… I knew that my path was with Jiu-Jitsu. So, I was going to school just so I can finish it and go train at night.

Watch Cole Abate share more on the video below: