I’m not here to sell you some romanticized version of martial arts. Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is a combat sport where you wrestle in spandex or pyjamas and try to choke people unconscious. It’s sweaty, uncomfortable, and your ego gets demolished regularly.
But precisely because it’s so brutally honest, BJJ teaches you things most people spend their entire lives avoiding. The mats don’t care about your excuses. They give you immediate feedback about what works and what doesn’t.
After years of running Partizan Grappling and watching hundreds of people move through their BJJ journey, the same patterns emerge. The same lessons that separate people who quit after three months from those who stick around for years.
These aren’t mystical secrets. They’re uncomfortable truths most people would rather not face.
1. Persistence Is the Most Important Attribute in Those Who Succeed
Not strength. Not talent. Not even passion. The ones quietly working in the background for years. Those with sheer grit and determination that refuse to quit.
I’ve seen this play out repeatedly. The athletic guy who crushes everyone for six months, then disappears. The flexible person who gets their blue belt and is never seen again. Meanwhile, that one person who got destroyed in every roll for the first year kept showing up, and five years later they’re a brown belt running circles around people with twice their physical gifts.
The difference? They didn’t quit when it sucked. And it will suck.
In the first few months, you’ll feel like you’re drowning. You’ll get submitted by people half your size. Your body will hurt in places you didn’t know could hurt. Most people quit right there. They tell themselves they’re “too busy.” What they mean is: this is harder than I thought, and I don’t like feeling incompetent.
The people who make it are the ones who make peace with being incompetent for a while. They show up on days they don’t feel like it. They keep training through plateaus. They don’t need motivation, they need discipline.
Success in anything meaningful comes down to one question: can you keep going when it sucks?
2. The Best Black Belt Started Off as a Fumbling White Belt
Too often we meet a high performer and put them in a different category. Expert. Elite. Cut from different cloth.
That person started exactly where you started. Don’t compare your day 5 to their day 5,000.
You watch a black belt flow through a roll, effortlessly transitioning between positions, and think “I could never do that.” You’re right, you can’t. Not today. But neither could they on their day five.
I’ve trained with world champions. Every single one sucked at some point. They got their guard passed. They fell over trying basic movements. They wanted to quit.
The difference isn’t innate gift. They normalized being bad at something. They were okay looking stupid. They understood the path from incompetent to competent requires visibly struggling in front of people, repeatedly, for years.
Most people can’t handle that. Their ego won’t allow it. They quit, or never start, or hop between hobbies looking for something they’re “naturally good at.” Then they see someone who stuck with something for a decade and think “they’re just talented.”
No. They just didn’t quit when they sucked.
Stop comparing your beginning to someone else’s middle. Everyone good at anything was terrible at it first. The only way from point A to point B is time. No shortcuts.
3. If You Want to Understand Something, Teach It
Especially to a beginner, even better to a group of beginners. You’ll be forced to unscramble your knowledge and simmer it down to pure essentials.
If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it yet.
I’ve watched purple belts who execute a technique perfectly fall apart when trying to teach it. They know how to do it, but can’t articulate why it works. That’s the difference between mechanical competence and true understanding.
When you teach, you can’t hide behind muscle memory. You have to identify exactly what makes something work. Break it down into steps. Anticipate problems. Explain solutions.
At Partizan, we encourage higher belts to work with beginners. Not as charity, but because it makes them better. When you try to explain mount escapes to someone who’s been training two weeks, you’re forced to understand fundamental concepts at a deeper level.
If you want to truly understand something, explain it to someone who knows nothing about it. The gaps in your knowledge become immediately obvious. Teaching develops clearer, deeper understanding than you’d ever achieve alone.
4. Absorb What Is Useful. Discard What Is Not. Add What Is Uniquely Your Own.
It sounds cliché until you realise how few people practice this. Don’t follow the crowd. Don’t worship a professor.
Apply critical thinking to determine what value you can extract, and what should be left alone. Don’t be afraid to be different.
Here’s what I see constantly: someone starts training, falls in love with a particular style, then tries forcing themselves into that mold regardless of fit. The lanky guy plays the pressure passing game because his stocky instructor excels at it. The flexible person abandons natural advantages to play a “more legitimate” top game.
It’s cargo cult training. Copying external actions without understanding underlying principles.
The best grapplers develop their own game. They learn from many sources, take what works for their body, discard the rest. They question conventional wisdom.
This requires critical thinking and courage. You can’t blindly follow. You have to evaluate whether something makes sense for you. Going your own way is uncomfortable. It’s easier to follow the crowd.
This extends beyond BJJ. In business, relationships, life, most people copy what they think they’re supposed to do. They worship conventional wisdom and wonder why they feel unfulfilled.
Take what’s useful. Discard what’s not. Add your own flavor. Stop apologizing for being different.
5. The Moment You Stop Being Curious, You Stop Learning
Everybody goes through slumps, but if you find yourself going through the motions without enthusiastic curiosity, something has to change.
Change your environment, your mindset, your focus.
You can tell when someone’s lost their curiosity. They show up, go through movements, roll the same game, leave. No spark. No questions. No experimentation. Their progress stops completely.
BJJ has infinite depth. People who continue improving years in are those who maintain beginner curiosity. Still asking questions. Still trying new things. Still genuinely interested.
The moment you think you’ve got it figured out, you’re done. Not because you’ve reached the top, but because you’ve closed yourself off to growth.
I’ve gone through this myself multiple times. Training felt like a chore. The solution was always the same: find something new to be curious about. Set a different goal. Focus on a position I’d avoided.
Curiosity is a choice. You can stay engaged or coast. Most people coast. They get comfortable. Stop challenging themselves.
If you’re going through the motions in anything, it’s a warning sign. The solution isn’t always to quit. Sometimes you just need a new angle.
Stay curious, or stay stagnant.
6. If You Want to Be Good: Show Up Early, Stay Back Late, Do Your Homework
Many things in life are outside your control. What you prioritise and how you spend your time is absolutely within your control.
Work as hard as you possibly can at something to prove to yourself that you can.
Excellence doesn’t happen during regular business hours. It happens in the margins. People who improve fastest aren’t just showing up to class. They’re arriving early to drill. Staying after for extra rounds. Watching instructionals at home.
This isn’t obsession. It’s understanding a simple truth: exceptional results require exceptional effort. The minimum doesn’t produce the maximum.
Most people don’t want to hear this because it means admitting their mediocre results are a consequence of mediocre effort. They want some secret, some hack. There isn’t one.
At Partizan, I can predict who’ll make it based on one factor: are they doing extra work? The person who shows up ten minutes early to drill? They’re going to be good. The person who shows up as class starts and leaves immediately? They’ll quit within six months.
Here’s the truth: you’re not too busy. You have time. You just have different priorities. That’s fine, but own it. Don’t complain about not improving when you’re not willing to do the work.
Work as hard as you can at something. Not for external validation. Do it to prove to yourself that when you actually commit, you’re capable of achieving it.
7. You’re Stronger Than You Know. Act Accordingly.
“I could never do that.”
We’d be shocked if we knew how often the only thing holding us back is a self-limiting belief. It’s better to back yourself and fail than refuse to try and never realise your potential.
I’ve heard this countless times in the gym. “I could never do that.” “That’s too hard for me.” “I’m not flexible/strong/coordinated enough.”
In that moment, they’re right. They’ve already decided they can’t, so they won’t try, which means they definitely won’t succeed. Self-fulfilling prophecy.
BJJ forces you to discover capabilities you didn’t know you had. You’ll escape positions you thought were impossible. Execute techniques you thought were beyond your skill level. Keep fighting when you’re exhausted. You’ll realize most of your limitations were imaginary.
Physical limitations exist, sure. But they’re way less restrictive than you think. The real limitations are mental. The stories you tell yourself about what you can and can’t do.
Most people underestimate their capabilities because they’re scared to find out. It’s safer to believe you couldn’t than to try and potentially fail. So they set arbitrary limits based on fear and live within them their entire lives.
BJJ teaches you to test those limits. Try things you think you can’t do. Push when you think you’re done. Most of the time, you’ll surprise yourself.
You’re capable of way more than you think. But you’ll never know unless you test it. Try the thing you think you can’t do. You might fail. But you might also discover you’re capable of far more than you gave yourself credit for.
8. The Most Powerful Thing You Can Do Is Start
This is also one of the most difficult parts. You’ve wasted enough time thinking about it. Embrace uncertainty. Embrace vulnerability. Take the first step.
The hardest part of any journey isn’t the middle when things get tough. It’s the beginning. Making the decision to start when everything is uncertain.
People spend months, sometimes years, thinking about starting BJJ. They research gyms. Watch videos. Read articles like this. They tell themselves they’ll start after they get in shape, after the new year, after work calms down.
Life never calms down. The perfect time never arrives. You just get older and your list of excuses gets longer.
The truth? They’re scared. Scared of looking stupid. Scared of being uncomfortable. Scared of being the worst person in the room. So they stay in analysis paralysis, forever preparing but never starting.
Here’s what I tell people “thinking about” starting: stop thinking and just show up. You don’t need to see the whole path. You don’t need it figured out. Just take the first step.
The same applies to anything you’ve been putting off. That business idea? Start it. That skill? Start learning it. That difficult conversation? Have it.
Action cures fear. The moment you stop thinking and start doing, most anxiety evaporates. But you have to take that first step. You have to be okay with uncertainty, with vulnerability, with not knowing how things will turn out.
The most powerful thing you can do is start. Not tomorrow. Not after more preparation. Now. Today.
Final Thoughts
These lessons show up in every challenging pursuit.
BJJ gives you a physical space to learn them where feedback is immediate and undeniable. You can’t bullshit your way through a roll. Either it works or it doesn’t.
You can read about persistence, but you don’t understand it until you’ve been mounted for the fiftieth time and chose to keep going. You can agree “everyone starts as a beginner,” but you don’t internalize it until you’ve struggled through it yourself.
What are you going to do with these lessons?
Read this, nod along, then go back to avoiding hard things? Or actually apply these principles?
Most people will agree, maybe share it, then do nothing. Agreeing is easy. Acting is hard.
So stop thinking. Take the first step.
About the Author
Written by Benjamin Marks, Co-Founder of Partizan Grappling Academy, a BJJ gym in Kingsford, Sydney. In less than 3 years, Partizan Grappling has become Sydney’s second highest-rated BJJ gym with 220+ five-star reviews.
Final Thoughts
