When the Answers Are Already Known, Look Where Everyone Stopped Looking

Lex Fridman puts three people at one table who are, in their own sports, widely called the greatest of all time: Georges St-Pierre in mixed martial arts, John Danaher as a martial-arts coach, Gordon Ryan in submission grappling. He asks, with no preview, for the key to their success. Danaher, who looks the most nervous, goes first. In any developed sport, he says, the basic precepts, the major techniques, the mechanical understandings are already worked out by the time you arrive. The job is to find the part of the industry that is currently undervalued and do what other people are not doing.

Every industry, like clothing, has fashion waves that push most of the field in one direction. What makes someone stand out is the eye for a product that is genuinely useful and currently idle. Leglocks had always existed in jiu-jitsu; the historical record is full of people who used them. For most of the sport's life the leading figures de-emphasized them anyway. Danaher saw unused potential, handed the work to the athletes around him, and watched the fashion reverse. If anything, he now thinks leglocks may be a little overvalued. The method travels: identify what is out of fashion, measure its objective value, and bring it back.

St-Pierre's version is directional. Everyone knows athletes talk about gifts and hard work. What they talk about less is the willingness to go left when the field goes right. He tried things that were not known to produce success, failed often, and sometimes found an edge. On paper he had no business taking down wrestlers with prettier pedigrees; nobody before him had even tried. He took them down anyway, in a different way, and that path became a blueprint. Ryan, a blue belt already beating brown and black belts, had a simpler vice: if something failed, he did it harder, faster, more aggressively. That degenerated into six months of spastic knee-slides into cross ashi garami against Eddie Cummings, a chubby librarian-looking teammate who kept heel-hooking him. Danaher suggested learning leglocks. Ryan changed the question from effort to skill.

Ryan's belief did not arrive as a speech. A few months before his black belt, a former ADCC champion came into the gym; Ryan submitted him four or five times in a hard round. He had not yet won anything. After that session he knew the sport could be a career. Olympic gold medalists often have to believe before they can perform, because they spend years getting beaten. Ryan's order is the reverse: the best way to believe a double-leg is to hit it on people. St-Pierre's turning points were losses. Against Matt Hughes he walked in fighting not to lose. In the moment he felt dominated; on replay he was winning until a stupid mistake. That tape gave him a championship mind. Then the hype arrived, he started believing he was unstoppable, and Matt Serra knocked him out.

First failure from a lack of confidence, second from overconfidence. The useful point, he says, is a precise mix of confidence and fear. Danaher had given him the metaphor: confidence is money in your bank account. You can have every skill in the world and still be a millionaire who cannot withdraw. Fear of a public beating — gym losses bruise pride and pass; fight losses do not — is what kept St-Pierre from easing off. Ryan heard a related speech about flipping a switch: Floyd Mayweather can play the character of the unbeatable man in public, then train like someone who can be beaten. Believe your own hype inside the gym and the persona becomes a trap.

Danaher does not do reverse psychology. He will not tell an athlete they cannot do it in order to light a fire. Confidence, for him, is physical underneath the mental story. A rational person watches where they succeed and fail; confidence grows around success and withers around failure. Set someone up to hit a move ten times in a row against quality opposition and the coach does not have to say much. The opposite is also true. Teach Ryan an armlock, watch fifteen failures in a month, then tell him he is good at it, and he will say you are full of it. The coach's words lose their credit. The rare exception is Garry Tonon and the guillotine: Danaher put his foot down, taught nothing else for months, ran through about fifteen variations, and a scrambler's missing front strangle became one of his best weapons. The investment was worth it because Tonon saw that many front-headlock chances per minute. Another athlete might never have justified the hours.

Ryan started talking trash, he says, because of St-Pierre. After his first EBI, people explained the win away. Scrolling St-Pierre's comments, he found the nicest person in the sport buried under thousands of posts calling him a lay-and-pray coward who could not finish. People will talk regardless. He decided to say what he wanted. He plays it per person, always plus one: they fire a bullet, he drops a grenade, then they trade. Haters occupy his downtime; he answers insults with statistics. St-Pierre frames the whole industry as entertainment. Professional athletes eat because people want to watch, the same as actors and singers. In the fight game an event is sold on emotion. Love me, hate me, but do not ignore me.

Danaher explains why the posters never talk tactics. Of a million pay-per-view buyers, a tiny fraction can read what is happening. The rest relate through feeling, which is why UFC Primetime films families and camps, not setups. He knows almost nothing about chess; two world champions mean little until you tell him they have hated each other for five years. Conor McGregor was the all-time master of that pull. Emotion is also a weapon. St-Pierre's favorite boxer, Sugar Ray Leonard, was the best of his era until Roberto Durán baited him, in Montreal, into standing in front of a man to prove he was a man. He lost. The rematch was easy. St-Pierre felt opponents trying the same trick and put a shield in front of it. Jose Aldo versus McGregor, he thinks, was the same bait: make a counterpuncher over-aggressive and leave his distance.

Ryan used it in the 2018 no-gi Worlds final against Cyborg. He had talked enough trash that Cyborg stopped trying to win and only wanted to hit him in the face, never even attempting to pass. Easy night. Against Tim Spriggs at ADCC he posted, ten minutes before the match, that what he was about to do would be criminal; Spriggs came forward angry and got submitted. The other possible effect is freeze: opponents so scared of losing after the buildup that they stall. André Galvão, six-time ADCC gold medalist and the man Ryan has chased since his 2016 black belt, went from pumping a fight on Instagram to flipping him off at a Flow event, following him backstage, and quitting after a slap. Danaher's measure of composure is a post-match quiz. If an athlete cannot say what he was doing in the fourth minute, he fought on instinct. Ryan is a logbook. Stone-cold calculation, words separated from deeds, is the asset Danaher thinks people underrate.

Diet is where the three of them stop agreeing. St-Pierre uses time-restricted eating and four water fasts a year, three to five days each, the longest five. He likes what it does for inflammation and immunity, and he likes the psychology: after a fast, sitting down with other people, he tells them his food tastes better than theirs. Sometimes you have to put yourself in suffering to remember how pleasurable a meal is. If a fight were coming, he would lean animal-based — high protein, high fat, carbohydrates mostly from fruit, and organs. He has watched the Maasai in Africa go for the organs first after a kill, the same order most predatory animals use. Western plates skip that density.

Ryan's constraint is illness, not preference. Recurring staph in 2018, a stack of oral antibiotics, a gutted gut, four years of a gastroparesis misdiagnosis, then a California doctor finding *H. pylori* plus fungal and bacterial overgrowth in the small intestine. At the worst he walked into every new room locating the trash can in case he had to throw up. He is one step above that now, not where he needs to be. He used to cycle a clean, lighter competition season and an off-season of cheeseburgers and pizza. Those foods wreck him. The menu is rice, chicken, eggs, fish, vegetables, fruit — miserable in Texas, land of barbecue. As a heavyweight he also cannot casually lose weight; some opponents walk around near 300 pounds.

Danaher has never seen a diet change produce a measurable improvement in jiu-jitsu performance. Longevity after forty is another matter. In their youth and prime he has watched Travis Stevens take an Olympic silver medal on McDonald's and candy, St-Pierre spend 80 percent of a career powered by McDonald's and Coca-Cola — Alfredo, the pre-fight meal of choice — Ryan's younger years as five hamburgers, Japanese judoka smoking a pack a day on the way to gold, Russian wrestlers eating whatever was put in front of them. Clean eaters were no better on the mat. Fridman suggests the belief may be the active ingredient: Stevens eats badly on purpose so that a body which has to compete anywhere can perform on Skittles, and McDonald's exists everywhere. St-Pierre offers, in earnest, the hangover cheeseburger. Fridman's mother told him the same thing at nineteen. Danaher notes that you cannot run a proper trial on it.

St-Pierre used to lift like a bodybuilder because Jean-Claude Van Damme and Arnold Schwarzenegger were the pictures of a fighter. He now treats cross-training as therapy for longevity: different movements from the ones combat sports repeat every day. He does not believe squatting five plates or benching three will make him a better fighter; he thinks it might hurt him more than it helps. Ryan goes the other way. Danaher got them into gymnastics early — toes-to-bar, the same knee-to-chest motion as retaining guard, plus muscle-ups — and Ryan adds a bodybuilding split, chest and triceps, back and biceps, three or four days a week. Weights are a supplement. He will not skip jiu-jitsu to lift. Moderate load, high reps, four sets of twenty with a drop set, because crazy weight tears muscle. Close to a fight he raises intensity. VO2 max barely moves, but redlining on leg press and squat teaches the mental habit of dying that sparring partners, technically beneath him, cannot impose. Wrestling does, because he is inefficient there.

Effectiveness in grappling, Danaher says, is skill set plus attributes. If a magic potion doubled your strength or your endurance, you would be harder to handle. The problem is cost. Hours carved out of skill work have to buy something you can feel. He cannot tell a 300-pound bencher from a 400-pound bencher on the mat, and that hundred pounds is a serious training project. Past a point, 400 to 450 is diminishing returns. Skills do not diminish the same way. Tonon's hours in the guillotine changed match outcomes; the same hours adding 25 pounds to a bench would have changed nothing. In case of doubt, especially after attributes are already respectable, invest in skill. Ryan adds the market: most people care more about image than function. Fedor is a hard sell until you flip it into a story. Given a choice between looking like Schwarzenegger and winning, or looking like Fedor and winning, most people take Arnold. Nike is not sponsoring Tank Abbott. Athletes feel an economic compulsion to look the part.

Volume is another split. St-Pierre does not believe in overtraining; he believes in under-rest. People glue recovery to training load and ignore the rest of the ledger — emotion, a death, being broke, cortisol, sleep. Combat is already a high-stress job. He also does not want every day to be the hardest day. The nervous system saturates; no more information goes in. For fight camp he likes short, because a championship is five rounds of five minutes, not two hours in a gym. Preparing to be a better finisher for his last fight, training with Ryan, Jake Shields, and Garry Tonon, they cut grappling rounds to three minutes. MMA almost never spends more than four minutes on the ground. Three minutes forced him to take the kill when he saw it. Ryan, coming up, did three to seven sessions a day, New York to New Jersey, because at purple belt he still did not know how to move. Now a third session finds him mentally gone. Less volume, more clarity. Lift in the morning, help teach, stay sharp for the one o'clock competition class, go home.

The two sports do not ask the same body the same questions. Ryan's matches run from six minutes to hours; St-Pierre's championship is five separate five-minute matches. Striking is explosive; grappling is mostly isometric. If St-Pierre trains into useless fatigue, a full-power roundhouse can end a career. A grappler can sit on the bottom of mount, practice survival, tap when needed, and still have a useful session. Exhaustion as a teacher is therefore legal in one sport and reckless in the other. From that emptied state, Danaher says, technique is all you have left, and you learn what kind of endurance you actually own. Fridman, as a recreational grappler, describes an hour of being submitted on repeat, then driving home in tears to Bruce Springsteen, and somehow seeing the rest of life more clearly. Pride, St-Pierre says, is often what keeps you moving when the honest mechanical choice is to lie down.

Fridman asks whether martial arts plug into something older. Danaher does not hesitate. Walk down a street, hear a commotion, two people fighting, and everyone stops. Humans are fascinated by violence; for a long stretch of evolutionary time it was among the most important facts of existence. We curse it and cannot look away. That is why combat sports have an audience that includes people who are repulsed and still watching. Most humans have a line of pride they will fight for. The line sits in different places, but it is in everyone, however carefully buried. Unrestricted, non-consensual violence is something decent people now reject, and he expects that rejection to spread. The old impulse still needs a legal channel. Isolated humans are nearly useless; cooperation builds communities; some disputes still end in a shoving match. We swing between those two forces. Combat sports are what that swing produces.

Fridman raises Richard Wrangham's thesis that we are the descendants of beta males who learned cooperation by repeatedly overthrowing alpha tyrants. Danaher is careful. Primates have biological alphas who monopolize females and set the group's direction; humans do not, not in that strict sense. We have political and sociological leaders with disproportionate influence instead. Killing the alpha, he thinks, was not the single trick. In a predatory world, numbers and technology decide whether a community succeeds. Language, growing communities, metal. As raw material, humans are pathetic, bottom of the food chain, with nothing but better-than-average endurance. Put them in a talking group with time to invent a metal spear tip and they can kill almost anything. Danaher's plan for a silverback is a deep pool. Gorillas cannot swim. He knows that because someone in a community told him.

Asked for the difference between fighting and grappling, Danaher starts with weapons. MMA has two ways to damage a body: kinetic energy through fists, feet, knees, elbows, and isometric tension through levers, for strangles and joint breaks. Grappling removes the first. You may hurt someone accidentally with a throw; the rules do not ask you to. So MMA presents twice as many problems in a shorter window. The deepest distinction is time. Grappling takes a huge amount of time to apply and, once you arrive, offers certainty. A takedown, a pass, the back, a strangle: a long chain. A punch or kick can be over in a quarter of a second. Grappling is for the patient and calculating. Striking happens in a blink.

Grappling is also more forgiving. You can make a terrible mistake, land in a terrible position, and still climb out. In MMA, get hit and stunned and your chances of recovery are minimal unless the round is ending. Ryan could theoretically fall asleep for thirty seconds under mount and finish five minutes later. That will not happen in a cage. A lesser athlete has a real "puncher's chance" in MMA; grappling is won, in a much higher percentage of cases, by the more skilled and conditioned grappler. Rule sets encode the bias. If Ryan sits in the middle of the mat, his opponent must follow him down. Sit in the middle of a cage and the other man can walk away. Grappling is ground-centered; MMA restarts standing every round. One sport lets you choose the terrain. The other makes you impose it.

St-Pierre trained to be competent everywhere rather than world-class in one place, because well-roundedness is extra technology: more ways to become the perfect nemesis for tonight's opponent. Ryan's distinction is fragmentation. UFC and Bellator differ at the margins and are basically one sport. Grappling is EBI, ADCC, IBJJF, no-time-limit, each weighting different athletes. ADCC leans slightly toward wrestlers who can stall into overtime and score a takedown without doing much jiu-jitsu. EBI demands a finish or dumps you into overtime from the back or an armbar. Ryan beat Yuri Simões under EBI and thinks he probably loses the same night under ADCC. Leandro Lo beat him under ADCC; under EBI that day, Lo's chances were next to zero.

The only man to submit Ryan at black belt is Felipe Pena. Ryan still says he will beat him. People remember the strangle and forget the first meeting was a 45-minute war and the second went the full twenty ADCC minutes; a back-take in the last two minutes prevented overtime. Since 2017, Ryan has a 55-match win streak over four years and every major no-gi title, with one points loss to Vinny Magalhães. Pena, in his reading, looks worse in no-gi, five-and-two since, including a domination by Galvão and a submission loss. Pena was much bigger both times. At the same size, with worse wrestling, Ryan thinks it is one of the easier matches in a bracket full of 260- and 270-pound stallers.

Fridman turns to St-Pierre's fight with Thiago Alves, which Danaher had been teaching as a clinic in strategy, skill, and heart. In the third round, on his back, going for an armbar, Alves cleared a leg and St-Pierre's adductor tore. He heard a pop. In the corner he told Greg Jackson he thought he had torn the muscle. Jackson's answer became a meme: I don't care, hit him with your groin. St-Pierre did not know the gravity of the injury, which is its own problem, but he was ahead on the cards and bit down. Alves was a tank. St-Pierre never wanted to stay in front of him: all the way out or all the way in. Outside, jab and footwork. Inside, a proactive takedown off a jab that lifted the eyes, or a reactive one, baiting the punch and changing level. Khabib's specialty is chaining wrestling once the opponent is defensive. St-Pierre's is the explosive takedown in the center of the octagon, because for him it is more economical.

His ability to cover distance, he says, comes from karate, not wrestling. Wrestling is how he finishes once he has the leg. Danaher calls him one of the greatest innovators in MMA history for that amalgamation, shoot boxing. Early credentialed wrestlers walked into cages and could not hit a takedown. Ranges, stances, setups, and even shoes were different; take the shoes off and you lose about 20 percent of forward drive. Wrestling determines maybe 20 percent of an MMA takedown, the finish after contact. The other 80 percent is range, rhythm, setup, opportunity — none of which wrestling class teaches. St-Pierre trained legitimate wrestling in Montreal and spent most of his energy on a striking-to-takedown system he largely built himself, in a Canada that had banned MMA and sent fights to Indian reservations. As a teenager a coach put boxing gloves on him, stood him on hardwood against a professional boxer in his late twenties, and told him he was not allowed to punch, only to take the man down while the man tried to knock him out. Adapt or die.

On the broadest level, Danaher says three things decide most MMA fights: who dominates pace, who dominates direction, who dominates setups. Win those and you win about 90 percent of the matches you are in. St-Pierre could always decide whether a fight went down, and he had the most sophisticated takedown setups Danaher has seen, proactive and reactive, equally good on the fence and in the open. Most athletes use the cage as a crutch. The scarier part, Danaher says, is the gym. St-Pierre regularly went with men several divisions above him. Danaher will not name names, but he laughs when people crown a pound-for-pound king he has watched St-Pierre put down, pass, and crush in training. It is rude to talk about that in public. It is also why he calls St-Pierre one of the only athletes who taught him more than he taught them.

Fridman asks the loaded question: St-Pierre versus Khabib Nurmagomedov, both in their prime. Danaher starts with size. They look similar standing. St-Pierre fought welterweight, Khabib lightweight, but Khabib is thicker and walked around heavier. St-Pierre spent most of his career between 188 and 191 pounds; Khabib would have a slight size and strength edge, part of MMA's trend of athletes compressing into lower divisions. St-Pierre has the best open-cage takedowns Danaher has seen; Khabib's genius is the fence, and keeping people down. Both ruin people with ground strikes, Khabib mostly punching from the back, St-Pierre mostly elbowing from the front. Neither is a Gordon Ryan, both are dangerous with submissions. Danaher does not think either holds the other down for a full round.

The decisive gap, in his view, is standing and distance. The few times Khabib looked shaky were when he had to fight going backwards; forward, he is a problem, backward, a noticeable asymmetry. St-Pierre fights both ways — most of the Alves standing time was in retreat. On the ground: Khabib a slight edge on the fence, St-Pierre a slight edge in the center, damage, defense, and stand-ups roughly equal. Skill gap in the stand-up does not mean Khabib loses. He can still grind rounds on the fence. The match could go either way. The three greatest mixed martial artists Danaher has seen are St-Pierre, Khabib, and Jon Jones. All three beat everyone they faced. Jones's official DQ is not counted as a real loss; St-Pierre's two losses were both avenged decisively; Khabib never lost. All three also have at least one disputed decision. All three could decide whether a fight went down.

Which of the three is best depends on the ruler. Quality of opposition, St-Pierre. Undefeated dominance, Khabib, and arguably Jones if you ignore the DQ, except that Jones's recent fights have not looked like the old ones. You could throw a blanket over them. Which name you pick says more about you as a viewer than about the athletes. St-Pierre's own answer is that the GOAT is not born yet. This generation has knowledge and technology the last one did not, and the last one had things the one before lacked. In sports you can measure — track, Olympic lifting — performance rises. Fighting is subjective, but the trend is the same, and not because genes got faster. People stand on predecessors. As long as knowledge transfers, the best is still ahead. Fridman wonders whether the greatest already lived a few thousand years ago and was forgotten. Danaher calls the loss of pankration's records one of the tragedies of martial-arts history, most of it said to have burned with the Library of Alexandria. It was the most popular ancient Olympic sport for hundreds of years. Plato was a pankrationist as a young man; the name is a nickname, *platus*, broad, the big guy. Imagine minds of that grade, city-state money, the best coaches, centuries of the most prestigious event on the calendar. We will never know what they knew.

The highest-percentage submission, Danaher says, has to be the rear-naked choke. It works across rule sets, weight classes, and body types, needs no special height, works in fighting and grappling, and does not care how tough the other person is. A heel hook is high-percentage in modern competition until someone decides not to tap and accepts the damage. A strangle always ends the match. Ryan, given one submission for life, takes the same one. Joint locks can be ignored; strangles cannot. Behind someone you have an inherent advantage: humans are poorly built for threats at their back. Chest to back, body triangle locking the hips, the man cannot explode or grease out. Historically, the people who stay stuck for a long time are the ones whose backs are taken. Mount you can bridge; a body triangle is where people get pinned.

The body triangle has a quiet history. Judo banned a related technique, *dojime*, a triangle around the abdomen from the back, apparently after intestinal injuries in the early years. When Danaher started jiu-jitsu, body triangles were rare, not a standard class item. Around the late 1990s and early 2000s people noticed the extra hip and torso control over regular hooks. Short, thick athletes struggle to apply it on big people; a very broad midsection makes it almost impossible. Because not everyone can do it, beginners rarely learn it, and it sat for years as a specialist tool for taller, higher-level athletes. In top competition now, given the choice, most people take the body triangle. St-Pierre's personal takedown philosophy is to cut the tree at the base — attack the legs — and, being explosive, he likes explosive finishes, a single that becomes a power double. He also notes the accessibility split: almost anyone can do a straight ankle lock; not everyone can lock a triangle with their legs. Highest percentage often means widest body compatibility.

Jiu-jitsu is an ocean, Danaher says. You can drift a long time and bring nothing home. You get one training life, shorter than your actual life, so you focus. He will not take tradition's word for what is low-percentage. Leglocks were supposed to be the ultimate low-percentage move; a large part of his career was proving that wrong. Ask why a thing is high or low. In front of someone, the highest-percentage takedown is both legs and a push backwards. One leg leaves a hop, a funk, a mess. Both legs, firm, going back, and the man sits, no matter how athletic. Easier still is already being behind him — the American mat return — because the front is all of his weapons, hips, head, hands. Third: front headlock. Distance is closed, contact is made, there is no sprawl, no standard guillotine or kimura panic. Tradition can be wrong. Mechanics will tell you.

Judo is the reverse case. Around 2010 the sport banned grabbing the legs, a change Fridman compares to banning kicks in MMA. You would expect the world rankings to scramble. They barely moved. Dominant countries stayed dominant; the same athletes stayed on top. That is evidence, Danaher says, that the people at the top are not specialists in a single rule set. There is a reason they are there, and it survives a rewritten game.

On aliens, Danaher splits the question. The universe is unimaginably large; the idea that we are the only life in it is naive. Whether they are here in silver saucers, stealing people, is another matter, and he is unconvinced. Navy footage and veteran pilots describe things in the upper atmosphere that are hard to explain. He will grant unidentified. He will not grant little creatures with ray guns. Show him the evidence. Until aliens land in Central Park on a Tuesday at 3 p.m. and start shooting, he is agnostic. Ryan is caught by a different scale: a civilization 65 million light-years away, looking at Earth, would theoretically see dinosaurs. We look at galaxies 100 million light-years out and see 100 million years ago. Danaher adds the dark Fermi reading. If they have not visited, there is a reason, and one of the scary ones is that sufficiently advanced civilizations destroy themselves. Humans are accumulating better weapons and getting angrier on Twitter and Instagram.

St-Pierre wants a second planet. History is unstable — asteroids, volcanoes, look at 12,000 years ago. If the species is to survive, it has to leave and spread seed. These are early steps on a long trip. He would like space. Mars he is less sure about, because of risk and boredom. Near the end of his life he would buy a one-way ticket just for the experience. If the technology is safe, he will go for a weekend; he does not want to be first. Danaher pours water on the romance. Even in the best case, a fast trip to Mars is an inauthentic exploration: you did not build the vessel, you are not in command, you are not important to the mission, you sit in a passenger seat and get off, as in Singapore or London. Fridman objects that a Mars crew has roles, like Magellan's ship, where every missing person hurt the voyage. Danaher grants that is better, then notes that most of Magellan's crew died.

They wander through SpaceX, reusable rockets, NASA bureaucracy, and specialization. St-Pierre wonders whether more technology makes us dumber: he uses a phone he could not build. Fridman sees conspiracy theories, even a large flat-Earth community, as a side effect of a world of specialists who have lost the habit of reasoning simply about existence. He then describes the robot dogs in his lab. They have memory. They remember the kitchen, his face. Unplug them and they do not start from zero. A microwave does not know him, does not remember when he was sad or fat. When a machine remembers, turning it off feels like a living thing disappearing. Anthropomorphism, he admits, but it is why he thinks we can build non-human systems we connect to, the way we do with dogs and cats. Danaher does not take the bait. St-Pierre asks whether human beings are self-aware. He calls it a good question.

Ryan is 26 and says he is not qualified, then gives two rules anyway. Find something you are both talented at and enjoy. Talent without enjoyment will not survive five, ten, fifteen years of showing up; enjoyment without talent will not turn into a life. Joy itself has to be rediscovered. White belt, it was new moves every day. As a professional, it was camps paying off on high-level opponents. After beating everyone, the joy is becoming the best version of himself, a peak he hopes sits between 35 and 40, knowing he can be better in a year or two. Teaching is a separate skill. He used to teach a lot, then met Danaher and realized he had no idea how.

St-Pierre offers five. First, decide what you want to become, not what parents or friends want; you may have to do unloved work to get there. Second, you cannot do anything large alone, so build a team that has both competence and trust. He has watched businesses hire friends they trust who cannot do the job, then face firing a friend, and the opposite, brilliance you cannot trust. Third, go through hell with the light in view; the dream is fuel. Fourth, invest in yourself constantly. When money arrived he did not buy jewelry and cars. He flew to New York to train with Danaher and Ryan, to Thailand for Muay Thai, to Los Angeles for boxing, because he knew people were coming for his place. Fifth, give back, and he insists this one is selfish. He gives only to the people and causes he chooses. More success means more help for the people he loves, which is new motivation. Satisfaction is the end. He no longer competes for himself. He competes to help the people who count.

Danaher gathers both, then adds three of his own. Identify the undervalued thing in your industry and show the world its real value. You cannot spend a life doing what everyone else does and expect a different result; that is irrational and arrogant, the claim that you are special. You are not. We are all pretty much the same. To be special you have to exhibit skills other people do not have. Third, focus. You cannot learn everything. You can take one or two skills, the more innovative the better, and become the best in the world at them. At his peak nobody integrated striking and takedowns better than St-Pierre, and nobody integrated grappling and striking on the ground better. He was not best at every MMA skill. Those two won most of his fights. Ryan began as the best leglocker on earth and the best at late-stage submission defense, then added passing, retention, a list that keeps growing. The day you are satisfied with your skill set is the day you get bored, and boredom for an athlete is a precursor to death. Keep growing and you can stay in the game a long time.