Lessons from the Sand Pit (Part II): Winning and Losing
Not all losses are created equal.
Some losses are statistical. A point here, a submission there. You shake hands, bow, and move on. These losses teach you technical gaps, strategic errors, things you can fix with more drilling and smarter game planning.
Then there are the losses that don't just defeat you but take something from you instead.
The first time it happened, I was under mount.
The guy was twice my size. Not an exaggeration, legitimately double my weight, and every pound of it was pressing down on my face like a slowly closing coffin lid. In BJJ, mount position is already suffocating. Your opponent's weight settles on your sternum and diaphragm, their knees pinch your sides, and every breath becomes a negotiation with physics. But this wasn't just mount. This was geological pressure. Continental drift happening on my ribcage and head.
I told myself what I'd always told myself: breathe through the chest and not stomach. Stay calm. Relax. Find the opening.
But my body had other plans.
My lungs were screaming. Not the managed discomfort of hard training, but genuine panic, the kind where your nervous system overrides all your mental conditioning and initiates survival protocols without asking permission. I felt my diaphragm seizing, my vision starting to tunnel at the edges. The weight wasn't just physical anymore. It was existential. It was darkness with mass.
And then my hand moved.
I didn't decide to tap. I didn't think "I should tap now." My hand just went slapping the guy three times before my conscious mind even registered what was happening. My body had called a vote, and my mind wasn't invited.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
The weight lifted. Air flooded back in. The match was over.
And something inside me shattered.
I've taken kicks to the face that made me see the light. I've had my shoulder torqued in directions it wasn't designed to go. I've pushed through exhaustion until I heard ringing and the sound of my own heart beat. But nothing compared to the feeling of my own body betraying every programming I'd spent years building.
All that Kyokushin (full contact) conditioning. All those hours learning to override panic, to stay present when every instinct screamed to flee. All of it meant na-da. When the moment came, my hand moved without me.
The ref raised my opponent's hand. Standard procedure. But it didn't feel like he'd won a match. It felt like he'd reached inside my chest and pulled something out. My soul, maybe. My sense of who I was. The story I'd been telling myself about what I was capable of.
I bowed. I shook his hand. I walked off the mat. Went to the bathroom. You can guess the rest.
This experience was so shattering I made myself a promise: Never again. Not with anyone.
That's when the obsession started.
Not the healthy kind of dedication where you train hard and improve steadily. The other kind. The kind where losing becomes a personal offense against reality itself. Where every moment not spent training feels like betrayal. Where you can't enjoy training because your mind is replaying the match, finding the moment where you should have bridged, should have framed, should have not FUCKING tapped.
I drilled mount escapes. I sought out the biggest training partners I could find and asked them to make me uncomfortable. I needed to rewire the betrayal out of my nervous system. I needed to teach my body that panic was a liar, that suffocation was survivable, that I could stay calm under any amount of pressure.
The obsession fed on itself. Every training session became a referendum on whether I'd fixed myself yet. Every roll was a test: Would I break again?
But obsession is a fire that burns hotter than you think. And eventually, it burns things you didn't mean to sacrifice.
The second loss didn't happen on the mat.
I lost my match. Badly. Not a close decision or a late round submission, I got dominated. Outclassed. Made to look like I didn't belong there. And while I was sitting there, marinating in my own inadequacy, one of my closest friends won his match.
He was celebrating. The team was celebrating. People were congratulating him, and he was looking around for me because we'd come together, because we'd trained together, because he wanted to share the moment with someone who understood what it took to get there.
And I couldn't do it.
I couldn't get up. Couldn't walk over. Couldn't even make my face do the thing faces do when they're happy for someone else. I was so deep in my own failure, so consumed by the feeling of being incompetent and weak and exposed, that I had nothing left for anyone else.
I just sat there. Hollow.
Later, much later, I congratulated him. But the moment had passed. And I knew that I'd failed twice that day. Once on the mat, and once as a human being.
That night, I cried.
Not the tears of physical pain or exhaustion. I'd shed those before and they'd always felt clean, almost purifying. This was different. This was the cry of someone confronting their own smallness. Their own capacity for selfishness. The realization that all the training, all the conditioning, all the talk about discipline and respect meant nothing when you were faced with the ugliest version of yourself.
I cried because I'd lost, yes. But mostly I cried because of who I'd become in losing.
The person who couldn't be happy for his friend.
The person who let his ego make him so small that someone else's victory felt like a personal attack.
The person I didn't respect.
And that's when I understood something fundamental: the losses that destroy you aren't the ones where you fail. They're the ones where you meet yourself and realize you're not who you thought you were.
Here's what nobody tells you about that kind of loss: it feels almost identical to winning.
Not in quality. But in intensity. In that primal, visceral state where you're not thinking or analyzing or being reasonable. You're just feeling with your entire nervous system.
When you win something that matters, I mean really win, not just collect a medal but defeat someone you've feared, overcome something you thought impossible, there's this sound that comes out of you. A warrior's cry. Not performed or calculated, but erupting from somewhere below your ribs. It's triumphant and terrifying and entirely uncivilized. It's the sound of someone who just survived something that could have killed them.
And when you lose something that matters, when you expose your own incompetence so completely that you can't hide from it, there's a sound that comes out too. The inverse of that warrior's cry. A howl of self-loathing so pure it bypasses language entirely.
Both sounds come from the same place.
Both require you to be fully, dangerously alive.
The problem is most people lose access to that state entirely. I see it everywhere now. People who maybe felt it in high school sports, or college, or their first real job. And then it faded. They got comfortable. They stopped putting themselves in positions where they could truly fail. They neutered themselves.
They stopped seeking the edge where losing actually hurts.
And without that edge, winning stops meaning anything either. You can't have the warrior's cry without the risk of the other sound. They're the same circuit. The same blaze. You either feed both or you feed neither.
This is the obsession I'm talking about.
Not an obsession with winning…that's just ego. Not an obsession with perfection…that's just fear. But an obsession with staying in range of that feeling. With continuously putting yourself in situations where the stakes are real. Where you can fail in ways that matter. Where winning actually costs something.
For me, these past few years, it's competitions. The IBJJF. Grappling Industries. Every tournament where I might get embarrassed in front of people. Where I might meet the limits of my skill and find them wanting.
But it doesn't have to be a competition. I've experienced it in other areas too:
- Scaling a mountain that scares you
= Starting a business that might fail publicly - Creating something and sharing it before it's "ready"
- Going back to face someone
- Being a catalyst for someone else's win, investing in their success without knowing or expecting nothing in return
- Anything where you have to show up incomplete and risk being seen that way.
Anything that keeps the circuit alive.
I still remember the feeling of being under that mount. The weight. The panic. The betrayal of my own hand.
And I remember crying because of a loss.
Both memories burn with the same fire. Both carved something out of me that needed removing. Both forced me to become someone new, not because I wanted to, but because the person I was couldn't survive those moments intact. It was meant to be.
In Kyokushin, I learned that pain ends. That the body can break down and get back up.
In BJJ, I learned that calm under pressure is a superpower.
But in losing, really losing, the kind that takes your soul and makes you cry at your own incompetence, you learn something else:
You have to keep seeking the thing that can break you.
Not because you're a masochist. Not because suffering is noble. But because that's where the aliveness lives. That's where the warrior's cry comes from. That primal state where you're not a polished, professional, optimized version of yourself. You're just raw and real and fully present in the moment.
Most people do everything they can to avoid that state after a certain age. They build walls of comfort and competence around themselves. They stop taking risks that actually matter. They domesticate the fire until it's just warm enough to be pleasant and never hot enough to forge anything new.
And they wonder why life feels flat.
I've been the world's biggest loser over the past two years. Competition after competition, business iterations after iterations, relationship losses all exposing gaps I didn't know I had. Revealing levels of incompetence that would have broken the older version of me. Learning more from each loss than people twice my age have learned in decades of careful, comfortable living.
Because I embrace the thing that could break me.
Because I stayed in range of that feeling.
Because I grinned at it when it showed itself.
The point was never the medal. It was never the record or the validation or proving something to anyone else.
The point was keeping the circuit alive. The one that lets you feel the warrior's cry when you win and the howl of self-loathing when you lose. The one that keeps you dangerous. Alive. Incomplete.
In Part I, I said being incomplete is the last lesson. But I was wrong.
Being incomplete isn't the lesson. It's practice.
The lesson is this: The only real loss is becoming the kind of person who stops putting themselves in positions where they can lose.
Everything else is just information.
Everything else is growth.
Everything else is the price of remaining human in the fullest, most terrifying sense of the word.
So yes, I lost. Yes, I'll lose again. Yes, it will hurt in ways that make physical pain look gentle.
And yes, I'll keep showing up for it.
And yes, I'll keep winning.
Because the alternative is worse than any loss: becoming neutered. Becoming safe. Becoming someone who no longer has access to that primal state where winning and losing both matter so much they hurt.
I'd rather keep my hand in the fire.
I'd rather stay incomplete.
I'd rather keep seeking the thing that can break me.
Because that's where I'm most alive.
And being alive truly, dangerously, uncomfortably is the only thing worth protecting.