Jiu-Jitsu is a Super Power

by matmartial · September 22, 2020

If you read our post Top 25 Benefits: Training Jiu Jitsu, you know one idea did not make our list of the top reasons to train Jiu Jitsu. On the Joe Rogan Experience, Jocko Willink told Joe Rogan that he considers jiu-jitsu to be a superpower.

Jiu-Jitsu is a Superpower

Jocko Willink: “Jiu-jitsu is a superpower.”

Jocko Willink: “Jiu-Jitsu is a super power.”

Joe Rogan and Jocko engage in a discussion of the importance of training Jiu-Jitsu on Rogan’s podcast, the Joe Rogan Experience.

Maturity

I learned from Jocko’s analogy to aging and maturing. You can tell that neither Joe Rogan nor Jocko Willink are impressed with their intelligence at 25 years old.

I believe that we possess an innate ability, or even natural disposition, towards lying to ourselves when we are younger and not yet mature. I also firmly believe that we must fight against any such inclination and extinguish it before it expands.

Lying to ourselves

Recently, I have seen my girlfriend experience this struggle. I understood that sometimes we must tell ourselves some version of things that might not be entirely true just to get by. Maybe some of us must create an absolute fiction in order to survive the circumstances of our human condition.

If I think about the 25 year old versions of myself, I see a man who thinks he is very smart and knows a lot of stuff. Now, two decades later, I see how little I knew then. It’s somewhat embarrassing, because no man wants to be naive, but I see now that I was mostly naive about big picture issues like family, success, work-ethic.

SOCRATES: Black Belt in Jiu-Jitsu

I understand that I have a natural inclination to question the purpose of life, the reason for my existence. The lessons learned from examining my 25 year old self suggest that I now examine my underlying assumption about life itself. Does such a reason really exist?

The following aphorism has been attributed to Socrates, “An unexamined life is not worth living.” If Socrates had trained jiu-jitsu, he would have been a black belt of the highest degree. I digress.

Here’s Jocko on how life is like jiu-jitsu.