Couchjitsu

In contrast to the last post, everyone’s the new guy sometime, something else I’ve learned in BJJ is you never know where someone is coming from. Loyal readers of this blog will know that I started BJJ at 34 after essentially being a couch potato for 20 years. I came in a blank slate. All I knew about BJJ was what I saw in MMA fights. I didn’t think that meant I knew how to do anything, but basically it meant I knew the term arm-bar, rear naked choke and mount.

A couple months after I started there were a few more white belts that started. It would have been a big mistake for me to assume that they were starting from the same base I was. In fact, one was a high school wrestler. While that means he didn’t particularly enjoy working off his back, it also meant he knew lots of ways to distribute his weight and enforce his will.

A few months after that, I was sparring against a white belt I had never seen before, within a  matter of seconds (30 maybe?) he had taken me down and arm barred me. We were talking later and he told me that he used to be quite active in BJJ (and possibly did some MMA, I’m not sure.)  The point is, I can’t look at someone and know their skill level. Just because you’re a no stripe white belt does not mean that I should beat you (and I guess just because you’re a blue belt doesn’t mean I should lose to you.)  One question I get asked a lot by friends who know I’m learning BJJ is “So does that mean you can take anyone in here?”  My standard answer is now “I can probably hold my own against someone who has absolutely no training, including wrestling in high school 15 years ago. But we don’t know who those people are.”

Perhaps the ultimate example of this was earlier this year. We had a seminar with two guys from Nova Unao, Leo Pecanha and Wendell Alexander. Both of these guys are world class black belts. In fact, I feel like calling them world class black belts is a bit of an understatement. The seminar was great. One thing that stood out to me, though happened before the seminar started. When I got to the gym I saw Wendell and Leo. Their reputations had preceded them.  As I looked at Wendell he looked like an in-shape 40 something. I commented to one of my teammates that if you saw Wendell walking down the street you’d think “That guy looks in shape. I bet he watches what he eats and goes to the gym.”  But there are bigger dudes than this guy. Guys who bench more than he does, or have bigger arms. The thing is, Wendell could incapacitate you with relative ease if he had to, and you would never see it coming, because in a lot of ways, he’s just another guy.

Over the past 6 months, there have been a handful of times that I’ve sparred with someone who hasn’t sparred much (or at all) before that night. It has been an interesting experience for a couple of reasons. First, it really highlights my progress. I get down on myself from time to time because the guys I train with are getting better at the same time I am, so I don’t always seen that I’m getting better. However, when I roll with someone brand new, it illustrates it for me.

Another reason it’s an interesting experience for me is that it reminds me what it’s like to be the new guy. It wasn’t that long ago that I was the new guy. I didn’t know what it mean to have an underhook or how to hold my hands in a gable grip. If someone put me in half-guard, I had absolutely no clue what to do. (Now I just have no clue, but not “absolutely no clue”.) It’s a good reminder of the fact that even the guys that routinely dominate me were new guys at some point. It might not have been at this gym, it might have been a decade or more ago, but there was a time when even our most experienced guys were “the new guy.”

It’s not just BJJ where this is true either. It’s all aspects of life. Looking back I can see lots of areas in my life where there were things I didn’t want to start or didn’t want to try because I didn’t want to look like I didn’t know what was going on. Which was funny, because I didn’t know what was going on. I think practicing BJJ has helped me see that if I want to learn something or do something, I’m going to have to start at the bottom, and that it’s okay to start at the bottom, because that’s where everyone starts. I’m reasonably sure that I’m fairly patient with new classmates, because I remember clearly what it was like to be brand new. I hope that carries over into other areas of my life as well, and makes me more patient with “the new guy” in all areas.

Bad Situations

In BJJ bad situations happen. Especially when you’re a white belt. There have been numerous times in my training where someone more experienced and/or bigger than me put me somewhere I didn’t want to be. For example, this week we were working back escapes and we were alternating between learning a technique and practicing it at close to full speed. It was my turn to to try and escape, as I was trying to escape, my partner was able to move into mount. As I tried to escape mount, I wound up being stuck on my side, with my sparring partner was laying on my top shoulder driving me down into the ground. At this point I was concerned about my neck. Where my partner was he had easy access to my lapels, so I had to be careful about any type of escape I did.  In the end, I wasn’t able to escape, but he wasn’t able to accomplish anything either, and time ran out.

But that’s not the first time I’ve wound up in bad situations. However, being in those bad situations has taught me what to focus on.  When you’re pinned down by someone who outweighs you by 40-60 pounds (or more) your first thought isn’t “How do I arm-bar this guy?” Instead, it shifts to “How can I get away from this guy?” And even more importantly, “How do I make sure this guy doesn’t harm me?”  Being in those bad situations helps you to realize exactly what is important at that moment, and what isn’t. You start remembering things like “chin-down” and “elbows in.” Your brain tells you to move your hips away, get your knee or foot between you and your opponent so you can create space and escape.

The point is, you’ll more than likely find yourself in these positions throughout your BJJ career. At least in the first year you will (that’s all I can talk about authoritatively, I’m hoping at the 13 month mark it magically never happens again, but I have my doubts that’s true.)

The same thing is true in life as well. I don’t know what kind of bad situations you’ll face in your life, but I’m positive there will be some. There will be a time when your only focus needs to be on survival. Perhaps it’s losing a loved one due to illness. Perhaps you’re the loved one with an illness. It could be a financial struggle, or something related to your job. It could be seeing your kids hurt. It could be any of literally countless options that will put you in a bad situation.

Once you’re in a bad situation, it’s almost too late to stop and think about what needs to be done when you’re there. On the mat, if someone gets to mount and I try to take a minute and think “What should I be doing here?” they are more than likely moving on to an even more dominant position, or attacking me.  So too with bad situations in real life.  How you handle that situation has a lot to do with how you’ve “trained” before that point in time.

If you lose your job, have you thought about expenses that you can cut that day to lessen the burden? Do you have a list of people in your field that you could call on the drive home from work if you were to be laid off? If someone you loves get sick, are you aware of the extras in your life that you could instantly jettison to make time for that person?

In order to get to a better position, the first thing you have to do is survive the position you’re in. Then move to escaping that position. If you can’t handle the bad positions, it’s going to be really hard (impossible?) to find yourself in a better position.

This is the first in a series, Life Lessons from BJJ. Or “Everything I needed to know I learned in BJJ.”

Surround Yourself With People Who Are Better Than You

For the first couple of months, I was one of only a couple of new white belts that showed up with any regularity.  When I started sparring, it wasn’t all that uncommon for me to be one of two white belts in the class. The first two months of sparring were a blur to me. I was drawn to class, I had an internal burning to keep going, but I was basically a breathing rag doll to most of my partners. I wasn’t excited to go because I knew I’d submit someone. Instead, I was driven to go by challenging myself with little things like “Only get submitted once per match tonight” or “nobody armbars you tonight.”  The people I was rolling with were leagues ahead of me.  It felt like I was riding the bench on the JV basketball team, and I suddenly had to go 1-on-1 with Michael Jordan.

But here’s the thing. I went to those sparring classes where all these guys were better than me. I tried my hardest to go against them, and tried my hardest to learn from them. Sometimes it was easy to learn as they’d show me an escape, or help me see what I was doing wrong. Other times, I had to learn more on my own. For example, one night I got armbarred something like 8 separate times. After class was over I was able to see that when someone was passing my guard, I had a tendency to roll my back towards them, exposing my top arm. Just about everyone attacked that arm differently, but the end result was still the same.  Since that night, I’ve still been armbarred, but very rarely has it come because I rolled to my back and basically gave them my arm. If was training only training with people who were on my level (or, if possible, worse) chances are they wouldn’t have attacked that arm, and I might go about my life thinking I’m pretty good at avoiding armbars.

Fortunately for me, the variety of people at my gym, and the variety of their games, means that I’ll be training with people who are better than me until the day I die. We have big guys who can smash. We have slightly less big guys who like to have active guards. We have smaller guys that like to move like water or choke you from nowhere. We have closed-guard, spider-guard, or half-guard players. It is truly a wide variety of players.

Just as that’s true in BJJ, I find that it’s true in life as well. For example, in school, you don’t want to be the smartest one in your group. Sure it’s fun for a while when you get to bask in the glory of everyone knowing how smart you are (I’m assuming this is the case, I was never the smartest in my group.) But what happens when you get stuck on a problem, or you’re not sure how to do a lab experiment? Other people are looking to you, where do you turn in that case?

Or how about personal finances. Would it really be fun to be the best at managing your money among all your friends? Sure you might have nicer things, but when you want to go out you’re faced with the reality that either 1. You’ll be paying for everyone or 2. You won’t be able to go because 1/2 your group already blew their paycheck.

Motivational speaker Jim Rohn talks about this situation when he says “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” The people you surround yourself have a big influence on who you are. And it’s a subtle influence. You don’t always realize the impact that they have. At one job I was at, I was part of a group of 4 or 5 developers and in that group everyone else loved using the newest, latest technology. They were the guys who had used a product since it was in the alpha stage, and by the time it was released to production, they’d moved on to something else. Guess what happened, I started spending more time looking at whatever the “next-best thing” was in our field. In the end, that helped me tremendously in my field. It helped be a better developer and it helped me sharpen skills that I might not have been able to sharpen otherwise.

Just like I want to roll with the guys that have amazing guard, or super tight chokes, in life, I want to hang around with people who are better than me.  It’s the only way for me to learn and grow.

As of today it has been 1 year since I started doing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.  I’ve done a lot in the past year that I never really thought I’d do. To start, the morning of August 6, 2012 I weighed 206. This morning, I was 183. I don’t think I had been under 185 since I was in high school (almost 20 years ago.)  That’s been a nice side effect. I didn’t start BJJ for the weight loss factor, it was just a nice benefit.

I went from barely being able to take 2 hours of BJJ a week (1 hour on Monday and 1 on Wednesday), to averaging close to 7 hours a week of BJJ. I struggled through the warmups the first time I took a class with Charles. Now I get up at 5:30am 3 days a week to put my body through a bootcamp type workout at the gym.

I passed my white belt stripe test. Demonstrating that I at least had a basic understanding of a handful of moves and could perform them when asked.

I started attending sparring class two times a week back in November. I now spar 4 hours a week most weeks (competition weeks being the exception.) One of my early sparring classes saw me getting arm-barred no less than 8 times in 1 hour. Now I’ve actually submitted some people. I also went from routinely getting tapped multiple times in each match to now having matches where I might not tap at all.

I’ve trained hurt. I broke one of my toes (first broken bone I remember having), taped it up and was back at class the next day. I’ve had various bruises on just about every part of my body, including what must have been a bone bruise. The bone bruise did occasionally knock me out of practice as it was just too painful for someone to grab my leg.

I’ve been able to provide people with gift ideas. I used to never have much I wanted for my birthday or Christmas (besides books, and a lot of people don’t think of books as gifts.) Now I can ask for rashguards, gis and other BJJ related stuff.

I’ve also competed in 2 tournaments (or 4 if you include the in-house tournaments.) That means I paid money and went to an event, lining up across the mat from someone who’s sole objective was to choke me out or take my arm off. To be fair, those were also my objectives. In some ways, this is the most surprising to me, because I didn’t think I’d compete in BJJ. I’ve won some medals in those tournaments.

In addition to the physical aspects there are other things I’ve done in the past year. I’ve experienced humility when in one match I’d tap my partner only to be tapped by him a mere minute later. I’ve learned some perseverance, from both trying to escape a bad position and trying to get out of a possible submission. One of the first time’s I sparred I tapped when my partner was in Kesa-Gatame, and told him it was due to me being “out of shape.” I learned, though, that while that position was uncomfortable, if I don’t give up, I can escape (sometimes.) I reaffirmed that the more you learn the less you know. One year of practicing something seems like a lot of time and a lot of effort. Especially when you talk about 200+ hours. But I’m still just a single-stripe white belt. From a learning stand point, I’ve just started.

I also learned how to be a better version of myself. Granted, I’m just a white belt and so I don’t have a real well defined game yet, but I know there are things I like to do (play closed guard) and things I don’t like to do (hang out in mount.) At our gym we have a wide variety of body sizes, athletic ability and experience. Trying to emulate the 250lb college wrestlers makes no more sense than trying to emulate the fast 150lb guys. I have to figure out what works for me and tailor it for how I want to play.

I look forward to what is to come in the next year, and the years after that. I’m sure a common theme for each year will be “Looking back on a year ago, I now realize how I didn’t even know what I didn’t know.”

A quick note before I head to bed to get some rest before the tournament tomorrow.  At my first tournament, I had 4 matches, 2 in gi and 2 in no-gi. In both divisions I lost my 1st match by head-and-arm choke. And I lost my second match by points.  As I’ve heard several times at the gym, tournaments exist, in part, to see how you’ve progressed and to learn where the holes are in your game. It might be fun to sweep all your matches, but at this stage, you probably won’t learn much (although, I wouldn’t mind finding out first hand 🙂 )

So for the Victory Grappling Championships tomorrow my goal is to do better than I did at Sasquatch. For me that means:

1. NO losses by arm-triangles

2. NO losses by submissions

3. Set up an attack

4. Get a sweep

5. Score points against my opponent

6. Win a match

I listed those in order of things I want to accomplish. To be honest, if I can manage to pull off the first two in 4 matches, then I’ll consider it an improvement. If I can set up an attack in a match or two, I’ll see that I’ve grown (I didn’t do that at all at Sasquatch.)  If I get all the way to #6 I’ll be ecstatic.

Updated

I ended up going 3-5 yesterday, for a total of 8 matches. I went knowing I’d get 4, and not expecting too many more than that. I lost both matches in my gi division, then won my first match in the absolute (open weight) gi division. Then lost my second match. At this point, I had lost 3 matches to 2 guys, both of whom are Mid-America students. The two guys I lost to ended up 2nd and 3rd overall in the absolute division.

Then no-gi came, and I lost my first match there. To be honest, I wasn’t even that bummed, I felt like I had gotten the monkey off my back by winning a match (first win at a tournament for me.)  He ended up taking my back towards the end and won 4-0. If I had paid attention better when Kyle went over toe-holds, I think I could have won. I grabbed his foot and tried for one, I just didn’t have it. My opponent even said afterwards that he was ready to tap when I started twisting his foot, but that I just didn’t have it.

I did the no-gi absolute as well. I won that match by guillotine. I pulled guard and pulled my opponent down, locked it up. At this point I was pretty ecstatic. I don’t have a lot of no-gi experience and only entered no-gi because I figured I was already going to be at the tournament, so why not get some experience.  I then lost the next no-gi match, to the same guy I lost to in my first no-gi match. That put in the bronze medal match. At this point I was 2-5. 5 losses to 3 people. I end up winning my bronze match, and the guy I lost to twice in no-gi takes second overall.

In the end, I lost to 3 guys (2 of which are from the same school.) All 3 placed 2nd or higher in the absolute, so it wasn’t a bad day.  Let’s look at the goals I set:

1. NO losses by arm-triangles

2. NO losses by submissions

3. Set up an attack

4. Get a sweep

5. Score points against my opponent

6. Win a match

I ended up getting 3 of my 6 goals. I lost all 3 of my matches against teammates by submission. 2 by arm-bar and one by triangle choke.  I didn’t get a sweep, although I was told after my gi-absolute match that it had more to do with me not trying a sweep. A couple people pointed out that I was set up, just didn’t pull the trigger.

I also didn’t score any points. So in 2 tournaments, I’ve yet to actually score a point, but I have 3 wins.

I feel like I improved, but obviously I didn’t meet all my goals, so those will carry over to the next tournament.

We had an in-house tournament today at Mid-America, and I was able to get in a few matches before I had to leave for my son’s baseball game. The format was a bit different than regular tournaments. For the first 1/2 of the match, it is submission only, and the second half it’s points or submissions.  I’ve trained a lot since my last tournament back in March, and I’ve tried to focus more on specific things during that training.  I had set for myself a couple goals:

1. Don’t get submitted in any matches
2. Score a point (I didn’t score any points at Sasquatch)
3. Win a match

Those are pretty much in order of what I wanted to get done.  The good news is I didn’t get submitted in any of my 3 matches. The bad news is, I didn’t score a point and lost all 3 matches. My matches were 4-0, 0-0 (ref’s decision), 12-0. So I did OK in the first two matches. My 3rd match started off good with me getting  guillotine when my opponent shot, but I couldn’t finish it and it was all downhill from there.

When I was done I was actually kind of down on myself. I had wanted to do better than I did. Obviously, you don’t compete unless you’re trying to win, so it’s disappointing when you don’t win. When I was heading out to my son’s game, the thoughts running through my head were about how much time and effort I put in to BJJ. I know I’m better than I was even 2 months ago, but it’s still a realization that there has been a lot of time and energy put towards something that, as of right now, I’m not that great at.

Going to my son’s game and the fact that we have family coming in to town today means that I’m not going to sit around and dwell on my losses. I’m not going to beat myself up over them. I’m not going to be depressed.  But the feeling of disappointment is very real. I was actually reminded of a conversation my dad & I had in his car. I must have been about 15. We were heading somewhere one day after he got off work, and he made the comment “Sometimes your best just isn’t enough.” To be clear, he wasn’t talking about any performance I’d just done or anything. And at the time I wasn’t 100% sure I knew what he meant. But as I thought about the statement, I began to grasp it. He wasn’t saying to not try your best (and definitely wasn’t saying not to try.) He was simply observing that sometimes you’re not capable enough to handle a situation you’re in.

Today I lived out “Sometimes you’re best isn’t enough.” I was trying what I knew, and had coaches tell me that it was some of my best work in a sparring situation. But today, the other competitors were better. As I pondered this fact, I realized that I’m fighting an up-hill battle. I haven’t hid the fact that until I did BJJ I didn’t really do much consistent physical activity. I took close to 20 years off. The last regular, physical activity I did would probably be playing on the freshman soccer team. So after a 20 year hiatus, I can’ t just expect my body to do all the things I want it to do after training for only 11.5 months.  That’s not an excuse. I won’t say “I didn’t do as good, but that guy’s younger and in more shape.” Instead, it’s an observation that starting later in life, after not doing much, makes things harder.

 

**Disclaimer** When I decided to start writing couchjitsu, I wanted to try and capture what it was like to train BJJ. There are high points such as first submission, getting promoted, winning a tournament etc. But there are also low points. One thing I want to make sure I do is capture the frustrations and disappointments. I still love BJJ and want to get to class as soon as possible. But I want to make sure I’m being true to the experience. So this post isn’t a “fishing for compliments” type post. This is what I actually felt and experienced today. And if you train or want to train BJJ, chances are you’ll have similar feelings at some point.

For a couple years before I started taking BJJ, I would watch MMA fights. Thankfully, I had a friend who had done some amateur fighting and was rather knowledgeable on MMA in general, plus he was nice enough to put up with stupid questions from me. A month or two in, I realized that “fight weight” really only meant the weight the fighter was at when he stepped on a scale. An hour or so before and an hour or so later, he weighed more and by the fight he was much bigger.  I didn’t necessarily understand why a fighter would do that, just that they do.

Now that I’ve been at Mid-America for almost a year, I still don’t understand what a fighter goes through, but I have a better idea of how little I understand.  For example, I’m preparing for our in-house tournament this weekend, as well as Victory Grappling Championships the next weekend. For these two tournaments, I just have to be under 200 lbs, since I’m not going to make the cut to 175. That means I don’t have to worry about weight. But at my last tournament, I did. That meant a lot of obsessive weighing the week of, to make sure I could get in under 185.  But for me, if I had missed 185, it would have just meant that I had to grapple against bigger guys (185-205 instead of 170-185.)  For a fighter, though, it would mean missing his fight or at least sacrificing part of his earnings if his opponent agreed to a catch-weight.

Another thing I noticed this week is that weeks leading up to a tournament seem to take forever. I’ve already started getting a little antsy, for both the in-house and for Victory. It’s the competition, it’s always made me a little anxious. When I played little league sports, I loved the 8:30 games because it meant I didn’t have to wait all day to go play. I hated the games that started at 12 or 1 because it felt like game time was never here. (I’m sure my parents didn’t feel that way.)  All week I’ve thought “Is it Friday yet?”

Then today, on Twitter, I saw a Tweet from one of the pro MMA fighters at the gym. He’s fighting on the Victory card the night of the tournament. He said “The fire within is burning violently, must contain it for 9 more days” To a larger extent, my antsyness is his life. I’ve got my job to help distract me from the question “Is it time yet?” I can go to work and think “Why is this code not working? What emails do I need to reply to?” But when he goes to “work” it’s the gym. He’s either teaching or training. Every day being in an environment that probably inspires him to fight that much more.

Finally, if I go to a tournament and lose (even lose badly) I get to go back to work on Monday and write code all day (which is something else I love to do.) But win or lose, a fighter has at least a month, and often more like 4-6 months before they fight again. That’s a lot of dedication and work involved. Because it’s not as if they take 5 months off and then train really hard for the last month. They’re training that entire time for 15-25 minutes of action (or less if they’re fortunate enough to win by stoppage.)

Since I’ve started training BJJ, my appreciation for what MMA fighters do has gone up tremendously. I never thought it was an “easy” job. Not too many easy jobs I know of involve getting punched and kicked in the face. But I hadn’t realized even a fraction of what a fighter goes through. Even now, I probably haven’t done more than scratch the surface.

If you were to sit in the stands at a high school track and see someone at the starting line, then close your eyes for a minute and when you opened them, that person was half-way around the track, you’d assume they walked over there at a fairly leisurely pace. But you couldn’t be sure how they got over there. Perhaps they sprinted the first 100 meters, sat down on the track for 20 seconds to catch their breath and then jogged over.  Or perhaps they sprinted almost all the way over, then walked back and forth for a while and when you opened your eyes they were half-way around.  All you really know is that where they are now is about 200 meters from where they were when you first saw them.

In some ways, progress in BJJ is like that.  If you were to watch me after my first month and then watch me now, you wouldn’t know how I got to where I am, you would only see that I can do a couple things a bit better than I used to. In fact, if you were to watch me training for my first tournament and my training for my next tournament (in just 2 weeks) you’d see progress. What you wouldn’t see is the Paula Abdul phenomenon, where I’d take 2 step forward and then take 2 steps back.

What I’ve noticed in my training is that I will have spurts where I feel like I’m making progress. I may even have higher belts tell me something I did good (a couple weeks ago, I few guys told me that they thought I was getting bettter transitioning from armbar to triangle to oomaplata.)  I will have a session where I do a good job avoiding submissions, improving my position or locking in a submission. That will almost certainly be followed by a period where I feel absolutely trapped and I wonder if I’ve learned anything. I lay flat on my back in cross-side, I can’t really get my hips to shrimp away, for some unexplained reason I stick my arm straight out and get armbarred.

I’m making progress, and I don’t doubt that. But it’s not linear by any stretch of the imagination. It’s sprinting forward one week, only to walk backwards the next. The next week I might just be sitting there, and then I slowly jog for a week or two. In the end, I’m still moving around the track, and if you only see me at intervals, you’ll think I’m making steady (if not slow) progress. If you were to watch the day to day progress, you’d see just how much I’m all over the place.

This year I started tracking how often I go to the gym for BJJ, and roughly how long I spend there. Each day, I log onto my website and add the classes that I did, and it keeps a running total for me. I didn’t do this for August-December of last year when I started taking classes. But I estimate that I did about 60 hours in those final 4 months.  So far this year, I’ve done approximately 171 hours. That includes technique, sparring, seminars and early morning conditioning.

As I looked at that number, 171 hours, a few things hit me. First, 171 hours of physical activity in a little over 5 months is something that that I would have balked at a year ago. Secondly, I started to think that was a lot of time in general. If I’d spent that same 171 hours doing paid side-projects, I’d have a good chunk of change to show for it.

But then it dawned on me. 171 hours is almost nothing towards mastering a skill. 171 hours is slightly more than a single man-month on a job. That thought made me reflect back to when I first got out of college and started working at Caterpillar. By my 5th week at Cat, I knew where things were around the office. I knew the name of just about everyone in my group. I knew what time we typically ate lunch. I knew the time that each of my coworkers typically got in to the office, and I had a rough idea of what the project was that I was working on. And by rough, I mean rough. I knew that I was making some kind of tester for Cat’s generators and that was about it.  There was still a lot of hand-holding going on, because there was still a ton of things I didn’t understand. But now, 13 years (or roughly 27,000 hours) later I’m much more competent in my field than I was then. There is far less hand-holding. People come to me to ask questions about how to develop something, rather than me always being the one asking questions.

Now, looking back at jiu jitsu. I’ve had several people comment about the amount of time I spend training jiu jitsu, and it is significant enough to impact other areas of my  life. I watch less TV, I haven’t done paid side projects in about a year, etc. But even if I keep up this pace for the remainder of the year, I’ll only have 390 hours of jiu jitsu this year, which translates to about 10 weeks of a full-time job.

That puts things in a whole new perspective for me. At the end of 10 weeks in a new career, if you said you were proficient, it would be doubtful, if you said you were good, it would be a lie, and if you said you were great, you’d be delusional. For me, I think I was on the job at Cat for about a year before I really started to feel like I “got it.” Not that I was good or even proficient, but I was starting to understand what this whole production software business was really all about. If I translate that into hours, it’s about 2000 hours (a man year is typically defined as 2080.)  So at my current rate of about 1 hour a day, it would take me a little over 5 years of training to have the same number of hours on the mat as I did at the end of 1 year on the job.

It’s pretty eye-opening to think about training in that light.