Hey everybody, how are ya? It’s Michael Martin. Happy Monday. It’s not Monday right now, but it is Monday. When you’re watching this, wanted to get right to it. We got a lot of viewer mail sent in from the home office in Peoria. Kudos, if you know where that’s from. So outside world versus your inside world. Ganja used a capital v I would’ve used a lower case in the title. This comes in from George. Michael, love your record at freedom and all this and that Freedom 90. Thank you. Michael. Wonder if you can talk a bit about what you learned from Juujitsu that you might have applied to your trading and vice versa. What universal truth you apply in jujitsu and in trading. Cheers mate.
So trading came first for me and I already had enormous amount of discipline as you would as one would in the commodity space because typically with the leverage that you’re afforded, if you smell smoke, you have to assume it’s a five alarm fire. So you don’t get to sit there and say, yeah, I think I’m just going to ju I know my stop is in at two 70, I’m going to drop at 10 cents cause I don’t feel I get knocked out because the losses get amplified super quickly and your equity curve starts to look concave down like y equals minus x square and that’s the wrong, excuse me, that’s the kind of parabola I’ve mentioned juujitsu a lot. I probably will talk about it more going forward. I think it’s great for people of all walks of life because it kind of makes a man out of you.
Basically. You don’t get to hide anywhere. You might think of yourself as highfalutin, smartest person at the table, killer in your field. Go to a jiu-jitsu mat. It’s the great equalizer. No one cares about your damn degree. No gives a shit what you drive. No one cares about what your zip code is. No one cares what you make. And you’re going to meet a guy who’s a white belt, might be three years younger than you, he’s got $800 in his bank account and he’s going to smash you mercilessly. And that is good for a person. It’s good for a human being to, I don’t want to say suffer humility, but to be in humility. And it’s not humiliation, right? Humiliation where it’s public, you’re getting peed on. That’s not the point of it. It’s just good for your character to know that you’re starting. And I think Anthony Bordone, if that’s his name, Bourdain said that it was later because he started much later in life in his late fifties rest his soul that he wanted to go being an expert in the kitchen to try to go something where he had no native knowledge and he was starting at the absolute beginning spot.
It’s a great feeling to go and to do, to put on a belt, a white belt and to know that you don’t know anything, but yet you’re joining something
That’s bigger than you. You’re now part of a bigger process and your contribution does actually matter. So for me it was to reiterate what I’ve already said before, it was to sharpen and hone a muscle that was highly, highly all evolved already in me. I wanted to be able to look at that from another angle. Slang on the street you’d say, be a man, go there. Take your beatings, come back the next day, right? Because what do you need to be a good traitor? What are the four things? I’ll give you a minute. Do you need a good attitude? You need to have discipline, you have to have persistence, you have to have determination. The good attitude comes in that you’re going to get beat up, not elbowed and bloody nosed and this and that, but you’re not going to win. You’re not going to score more points than the people you’re training with.
In our school. We don’t submit white belts because they don’t know how to defend themselves. So for the first three to six months, we teach them how to defend themselves. We spend half the class also, unlike other schools where they focus on competition, we do have a competition element to the school. We have special classes for that, but for the most folks are recreational terros as they’re called. And so we spend half the class doing self-defense and yours truly is part of that leadership. So you teach people to know how to handle themselves and all of a sudden their confidence changes because I can assure you, if you are a big fan of Khabib, Habib, OV or whatever his name is, or Connor, this and that, or anyone else for that matter, watching those people throw leg kicks and question mark kicks and knowing what it is and recognizing it does not mean in the least that you can pull it off.
So again, we talk about trading enthusiasts versus the people who are just saying, I don’t care what it looks like. I’m going to get in the game and I’m going to start smashing and I’m going to get beat up every day. And I’m humble enough to say it. It happened to me for four years. Two, I’m humble enough to say two, that you never stop discovering things about yourself. Even with 30 something years of experience, I’m sure, and this is true, being completely blunt, I’m sure that there’s a hole in my game somewhere. All I know how to do is keep my losses small. So if that hole is there, I know it’s not going to ever take me out because I don’t let myself become mentally weak. You see, I don’t give myself permission to be a loser. Most people do. I can’t say that there’s anything in the juujitsu world that I’ve taken and applied to trading because trading came
First me. I can say that there’s an enormous amount of similarities. It’s all about playing superior defense. The kids we have from the nonprofit that we run basically have a situation where Yago came in second place, for example, at the World Championship, and he didn’t give up any points, won silver medal, and he lost the last match, which was zero zero by advan, what we call advantages. I’m not going to get into Jiujitsu scoring here, but he had four fights, Luta, five, nothing, four, nothing, two, nothing. And then the last one was zero zero. And to compete at that level and to not give up any points is savagery bravo, as they say. And so there are a lot of similarities that what you don’t lose in the market, you don’t have to earn back. He’s in a pure competition school in Cica, in Rio de Janeiro and we, it’s basically a scholarship school that we’ve set up and we pay for everything, pay for the tuition. We give him dinner, we fly ’em all over the place. He goes back and he’s a great role model for his peers. We have about 950 students across four schools in the various alums that are called Favelas, and he’s one of probably a dozen or so athletes that have competed in house up the ranks since he’s about six. He’s 17 now. He won silver in the worlds. He just competed in the American Nationals in Las Vegas, and he came back with three gold medals for Gia Nogi.
And why? Well, it’s because you can’t score a point on the guy because he knows if you score a point and you sweep him, it’s two points. He’s got to earn two points back now just to get back to break. Even these, the kids that he competes against are so good. You can’t afford to get swept and to get up mount and have it six, be six, nothing in jujitsu. We say, it’s me and the mad against you and I get on top of you. I’m going to smash you. I’m not going to let you move. I’m going to force you to make a mistake. That’s why it’s so good for human development. I think every person in the world should take Juujitsu because of the character building.
I really do. Worst case scenario, you learn self-defense that you can use. It’s quite remarkable. So jujitsu two forces you to be in uncomfortable situations. When someone has position on me, then I need to stay calm. I need to focus on technique. It’s not about athleticism, right? Normally you’re matched up with at least people who are your weight. But in a recreational environment, when I was trained with my friend Sydney, who’s a first degree black belt, my teacher’s got five degrees on that. Saturday, we, a week ago Saturday, they killed me. But it’s like I’m giving up 50 pounds to each one, at least 50. I’m giving up between 25 and 50 pounds. As besides the years of experience, they both been doing jujitsu for over 20 years. So it’s like I have to come in with realistic expectations. And so the idea is how can I defend what they’re trying to do?
How can I anticipate their attacks and put myself in a better position to go on the attack so that they have to defend because they can’t choke me or score points against me. If I’m on the attack, they have to defend, then make a transition and then go on the attack. So I can hold my own surprisingly well. But some days, just like in the markets, you get beat and that’s just the way it goes. There’s other days where I do surprisingly well, and that’s the way it goes too. It doesn’t really from one day to the next, it doesn’t say a whole lot. But the idea though is that you put yourself into a challenging situation. You have to focus on technique. Athleticism is maybe five or 10% of it. Much of it is emotional intelligence and trait or psychology, if you will. So I do think there are lots of benefits.
I train six days a week. I don’t know that everyone can afford that in terms of their time, but there are some great benefits to you. Plus you develop a certain mindset because jujitsu is a belief system. It’s a way of life. It has its own language. In fact, there are words in Portuguese that they use in Juujitsu that wouldn’t mean anything on the streets of even Baja Juka or other parts of De Janeiro, for example, because they’re not like they’re slang, but they’re situational. So you know, can gain a lot from that if you wanted to. But I think this is true in many things in life, is that you have to engage. You don’t want to be a voyeur on these types of things when it comes to trading or otherwise. It’s like you want to get guian, get on the mat. If you do nogi, no Giada and kimono, whatever you want to call it, you can do that too. It’s a different type of a game, but it’s still juujitsu and it can be very, very rewarding. And you look at it like a as personal challenge. So I wouldn’t be signing up for these online watching John Danaher, I love John’s, a great guy, went to Columbia like I did, and he’s a great teacher. But whatever you see on video, you have to go do on the mat. You’re not going to learn how to do it or
Think that you have any type of mastery because you’ve watched somebody else doing it. Again, this is the huge problem in trading is that people want to watch different videos, see things intellectually, but it doesn’t mean anything to you until you’ve experienced it. And then you can calibrate it with your own internal system. So that’s my 2 cents on jujitsu. Maybe one of these days I’ll have some of the kids who we have in town on the show and we’ll go back and forth. Some of them have really good English. Other ones we’re going to have to speak in Portuguese and put in subtitles. But you’ll really love them. They’re so genuine, they’re so happy to be here. And they’re good, man. They’re damn good. But thank you for the question. I appreciate it. You should go try it out. Most places will let you try a class or two before you have to make a commitment. But I don’t see any, see that any way you can lose by doing jujitsu and jocko’s absolutely right when he says that it’s a superpower. That’s something I agree with wholeheartedly. Please like and subscribe. If you have any comments or feedback, please leave them here. I read everything and I wish you the best. I’ll see you tomorrow.
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