Absolutely. I try to go into everything with a white belt mentality. I have a big background in martial arts. I still do Jiu Jitsu and stuff like that. I do some MMA and things. The one thing that I learned…Actually when I came out of college, I got a degree that meant nothing to me. I wasn’t ever going to use it. I opened a karate school.
I thought, because I was the top guy at that school, that I was a top guy. Then, sure enough, a guy walked in one time. He was literally 35 years old, and he was a Jiu Jitsu guy. I’m a stand-up Muay Thai kick boxer guy and trying to learn some Jiu Jitsu stuff. That was back when UFS was pretty in its infancy and stuff like that.
We get on the ground. I know a little bit of Jiu Jitsu. I’m strong, in shape, like 22, ready to go. This guy mops the floor with me to the point that I was literally incapacitated. I couldn’t do anything. It wasn’t even I was putting up a fight. I sucked.
I’ve had so many lessons like that in my life for like I judged somebody. I was like, “Man, I got this guy,” and then you don’t. It’s like whether it is looking at a person or a new set of skills, or even the same set of skills, so many people…
I’ve been lifting for 25-30 years. Some people would consider me an expert and I’m like, “I’m not an expert at all man.” I know next to nothing about this. All I know is the very basics. The more that I learn, the more that I realize that I really don’t have a broad wealth of knowledge of this.
I know what I know. I have seen what worked, and I try to stick with those things, but there is so much to learn in every single field.
Something that’s been very exciting for me — I’ve done the same thing as far as fitness and lifestyle thing like that for so long — but when I started doing this bushcraft stuff and started learning a new skill, so many neurons in my brain just started…I started making new neural pathways.
It was like the world was so exciting again because, right now, even if you learn a new movement, if you learn a new Strongman movement, or you pick up some CrossFit different exercises and things like that, when you start learning them, it is so much fun to learn a new variation, or a new thing, or new something, even if you suck at it.
Your brain just going, “Wow, I’m a sponge again.” I get to mess around with something that I don’t have expectations or the result that I know is coming. What that can do for not only your brain but your just whole life because you get excited about living again because new things excite us.
As long as every single time you go into that, you don’t look at it as a big, overwhelming thing. I mentioned earlier, I know absolutely nothing about working on cars or anything like that. The reason why I don’t is because it seems so overwhelming. I popped the hood of a car, and I’m like, “I don’t have the first clue where to start.”
That’s how a lot of people feel about weights. That’s how a lot of people feel about bushcraft. That’s how a lot of people feel about everything because everything’s hard at first. Riding a bike was hard at first. As long as you go in humbly, and you just focus on one step at a time. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.
You can’t take on more than you should at a time. You’re just taking small goals, small steps, and then just refocusing the next step, and small things add up and become big things very quickly.
This is something that I’ve stressed, especially in last year on my YouTube channel, is that if people have been in a rut, especially with the coronavirus and things like that, hitting in.
How many people got into a different type of workout, like hiking or body weight stuff or calisthenics, or they started because they had to. The world shifted them into a different place and they had to do something, and then they opened up a whole new world.
A lot of people saw a lot of really great gains and progress because of their body responding to new stress and new stimulus for that adaptation.
I don’t think it’s ever a bad idea to start learning something new. It doesn’t mean that you need to train it like you’re going on to become a world champion, but having a cursory knowledge of many things is so useful later in life. As I get older, the more being able to fix a lawn mower, to carve something, to do whatever, like all those things add up and it all matters. It does.