Changing the playing field
What can we learn from Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu?
How much do you know about martial arts? We did not know much either until we came across Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ), a practice that stems from the idea that you can change the playing field to gain a competitive advantage.
[Note: If you are not familiar with BJJ, it is a modern martial arts discipline predominantly ground-based, using the principles of leverage and pressure, as well as knowledge of the human anatomy, to achieve a non-violent submission of an opponent. It essentially allows a smaller, weaker person to successfully defend themselves against a stronger, heavier opponent.]
To win at something you can either understand the rules of the game, learn how people play, and do your best to win (which is what most of us do by default), or you can be smart about it.
1993. First edition of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). After years of heated debate about which was the ultimate martial art, the UFC was organised as a multidisciplinary championship that brought together contestants from the entire world. It gathered fighters from Sumo to Boxing, Judo, Savate, Shootfighting, Kickboxing, Taekwondo, Kenpo, and BJJ.
Needless to say, the stakes were high.
Everyone was caught off guard when Royce Gracie (BJJ) came out victorious. People were dazzled. How did the lightest fighter, practising a martial art that does not rely on kicking and/or punching, win?
Well, he changed the playing field.
While most martial arts are rooted in fighting on your two feet, BJJ focuses on tackling your opponent to the ground. Gracie brought the fight to his turf, where he had a competitive advantage because (a) kicks and punches are not as effective when you are lying flat, and (b) BJJ technique had been developed precisely for ground fighting. Once they were down to the floor, there was only one player who knew how to move in that arena. BJJ pioneers (the Gracie family) did not try to win at the punching/kicking game; they changed the game altogether.
Life is a series of endless games that we play every day (e.g. the game of earning money, the game of making friends, the game of finding a partner, the game of getting good grades, the game of being happy…). How do you maximise the chances of winning at these games?
- Identifying what competitive advantages you either have or could develop, and bear in mind that these can be any attribute(s) that set you apart: a skill, a personality trait, a physical feature, or a circumstance.
- Transforming the game you are playing so you can leverage them.
This does not mean you can only be successful if you radically change your approach; sometimes the smallest changes, the ones that look obvious in hindsight, are the ones that made the biggest difference. In the case of BJJ, it was literally fighting on the ground! It sounds so simple, but no one thought about it a few years back. It is also worth mentioning that you do not need to apply this to every single aspect of your life; there probably are a couple of key areas that matter most to you. We can all think of small tweaks to our lives, can’t we?
BJJ has made us reflect on instances where making small adjustments to an otherwise common strategy has made a difference to us or people we know.
Increasing your savings to… buy a house?
As mentioned in our first blog entry, we were both working in Madrid before we decided to move to Sydney. The key motivations for moving were a better lifestyle and increasing our savings. We have met other people here with a similar story, but we would like to introduce an inspirational Spanish couple that is a good example of how changing the game can help you achieve your objectives.
This couple wanted to buy a house in Madrid. They had been working for years but with their salaries they could not afford to save fast enough to make a down payment for a house in a timeline that was reasonable to them. What did they do? They changed their strategy. No one ever said you need to work in the same place where you will buy your house, right? They quit their stable jobs in Madrid and came to Sydney. Average salaries in Sydney are ~110% higher (after tax) than those in Madrid, whereas the average cost of living only increases by ~48% (Sydney vs. Madrid). Just by moving, they have increased their ability to save more. They are not there yet, but they have shortened that horizon.
Landing your desired job… in unconventional ways
How do you make it clear to a company that you are eager, motivated, and the right fit? Our good friend from the first example will help us illustrate this.
What is the recruitment game? Companies (big and small, a bank and a bakery) do recruitment in the best way they can, which is usually far from perfect. They usually receive more applications than they can realistically assess with the resources they have, so they have developed standardised processes. Although not perfect, it allows them to have a mould against which to measure candidates.
Individuals become CVs, and it is hard to stand out. How do you become memorable? If what comes to mind is “prepare a unique resume and cover letter, and apply online”, you need to try harder.
Back to our friends. It is worth mentioning that neither of them had a job when they landed in Sydney. She had been working in Marketing in Spain and wanted to maintain her trajectory, but she found it hard to land a job in her field because she did not have previous experience in Australia.
She found a big Spanish international company, but she could not get her dream job right at the beginning. She did not despair. She applied for an in-store job. She is outgoing, friendly, very organised, and overqualified for that job. She was vocal about her aspirations and went above and beyond her job description to prove she deserved her target job. When she applied for an office manager role, it was a solid yes. After a few months, she asked for a promotion. Another yes. She finally had the opportunity to join the Marketing department. Guess what? When the Marketing manager was looking at her case, our friend clearly stood out: she knew the company in and out, and they already knew she was a good performer.
It was much easier for her to land that job then than it would have been a year earlier, where she was just another CV. She changed her strategy. She re-started from the bottom and strategically made her way up in a matter of months.
Think about other alternatives for you to stand out. What’s the worst that could happen? It does not work? You still get another chance through the pile of CVs.
Food for thought: Learning to be happy
Sure, buying a house and landing a job might be important steps in our lives, however, are these not part of a bigger plan? In the end, are we not doing all of these to be happy?
How do you define happiness? An answer that many of us gravitate towards is “having everything I need/want”. This answer usually regards happiness as something relative (i.e. how you compare vs. your peers, or even worse, vs. people you do not know) because what you consider to be important is influenced by what other people have (i.e. prestigious jobs, nice houses, successful businesses, handsome partners, perfect families, fancy cars, dreamy holidays, etc.). If your happiness depends on external comparisons, whatever you achieve will never be enough because there will always be someone better off than you.
Is that really the game you want to play?
We have been doing some research on the subject, and an alternative way of approaching the search for happiness is to change the playing field. Switch from a multiplayer game (i.e. comparing yourself against others) to a single-player game (i.e. looking for happiness internally without seeking external validation).
It is easier said than done, especially when our brains are hardwired to make us social animals. We have been thinking about how to crack this game, and although we have not figured it out completely (yet), we are actively working on a couple of things:
- Meditation helps to develop awareness of your mind and thoughts, which allows you to recognise when your mind jumps to comparison mode
- Stop complaining and distance yourself from negative people. As the Stoics would put it, things are not good or bad, they just are. Something can only be bad if you are comparing it to something else.
- Shit happens, it is inevitable. How you deal with it is what makes the difference. Acknowledge that when things go wrong it will be painful. But don’t get stuck suffering. Suffering comes when you don't accept reality and overthink what happened. The classic “why me?” implicitly means “why me, and not you?”, falling again into the multiplayer trap.
These are just a couple of examples, but you get the message. Don’t do everything using the same playbook as everybody else; winners are usually doing something different.
With all of this in mind, how does this apply to your life? Start by picking one thing that matters to you and think about how you can change that game. We would love to hear what you come up with!
