What’s the most important, most valuable skill that a BJJ athlete can have?
No, it’s not any sort of a submission technique chain nor a guard pass… It isn’t even being courageous nor being ready for challenges.
In fact, John Danaher believes that the most valuable skill that an athlete can have is persistence.
Here is why – because being persistent is not as “simple” as it sounds:
The one indispensable virtue [among athletes] is persistence. The ability just to stay in the game long enough to get the result.
Most people see it as a kind of simplistic doggedness where you just show up every day. That’s not it.
The most important form of persistence is persistence of thinking; which looks to push you in increasingly efficient, more and more efficient ways of training.Famously, people talk about the idea that the hardest work of all is – hard thinking. And they’re absolutely right.
In other words, you need to stay conscious of the things that you’re (not) doing in the gym. For, just doing the same things over and over won’t get you far:
Coming into the gym and just doing the same thing for a decade isn’t going to make you better.
What’s going to make you better is progressive training over time, where you identify clear goals – marked out in time increments… Three months, six months, 12 months, five years…
And build those short term goals into a program of long term goals. Making sure that the training program changes over time.
