Create the situation that brings the stressors necessary to force you to adapt

The more complex the phenomena the less nature condescends to give you its operations. It doesn’t let you know how everything adds up. It doesn’t let you know its underlying mechanisms at any great level of detail.

Perseverance, mechanistically speaking, is simply the constant sampling of possibilities.

You can’t adapt by reading books and taking courses. That’s not adaption. That’s pretending there’s a path in order to become something when there is no path.

We need to get away from just doing the action, and instead learn to reframe an area of interest in terms of its performance. We need someone on the other end expecting us to deliver.

Start at the end. Act as though you already know how to perform. Place yourself into real environments and force yourself to rise to the ocassion. You’ll be amazed at what you’re already capable of, not because you know how, but because you were compelled to survive. When the most important decision you make is what environment to place yourself into, competency is inevitable

Essay by Sean McClure. Argues that when people try to develop new competencies, they are too often too focused on charting a linear path. The linear path traditionally involves a lot of reading around a subject, doing beginners classes and focusing on hammering down the basics. Contrary to this view, McClure thinks you develop competencies in highly complex domains, where “solutions” are analytically intractable, by selecting environments that force you to adapt.

I think this is a great model for looking at development in BJJ: if you only do fundamentals classes, you won’t accumulate some critical mass of fundamentals classes that will make you good in rolls; you have to start with rolling.