How Judo Taught Me to Avoid Startup Burnout

One thing I gained from judo was the importance of persistence. There are no doubt a lot of people who have better technique than me. They had better instructors who came from famous clubs, maybe even the Kodokan. I started at the Alton YMCA.

There are probably lots of people who have more natural athletic talent than me. I was never particularly fast. I'm also very near-sighted, so I couldn't see the scoreboard or time clock for most of the years I was competing, until I finally got contacts. I injured my knee really badly when I was a teenager and couldn't do any technique that required putting all my weight on my right leg.

Despite many disadvantages, I won anyway, over and over.

What I did learn was to be persevere.

(This might be why Forgotten Trail is my favorite game, because we dropped a lesson on perseverance in there.)

Get Forgotten Trail

How did learning perseverance help me run a startup?

Face facts, winning a world championships is one hard slog. In my day, you had to win the state championships to qualify for nationals. After that, you had to be good enough to make it into at least the top five to get points toward the national team. There were several tournaments each year that earned points toward the world or Panamerican team. When the trials came around, the top 8 people were invited to compete.

So, there were a lot of times each year I had to be ready to win. After the World Trials, of course, there were still tournaments in Europe and then the world championships. There isn't a lot of time to just relax and decompress because each time after I'd win the next tournament was going to be at an even higher level of competition.

Running a startup is kind of like that. First, you need to make a prototype, which maybe you can do by yourself or with your one or two co-founders. Then, you need to get some customers. To scale, you probably need to bring in employees and the amount of money you require increases. You need to go out and get your first investors.

Our company is over five years old now. We've survived where many startups have run out of money, failed to gain customers, couldn't build the desired features. At each step, it gets harder. Now we have more products that need updates, to put on more devices. We have customers who have questions. More employees means we need more sales, more investor funds.

So, that is one place that judo helped. I have learned that success isn't just a matter of working hard but working hard over a very long period of time.

Many competitors I knew worked just as hard as me, or even harder, at a single practice or a single training camp, but the next time or the next month or year, they weren't there.

Judo also taught me successful strategies to keep moving forward.

Sometimes, I was just tired of fighting the same people over and over. I worked full time as an engineer in San Diego so I didn't often have the option of traveling all over for training. Manny Gamburyan described it well when he was talking about doing judo with Karo Parisyan,

"I've fought him so many times, it's like fighting myself."

My usual day was to come in, do 25 or 50 throws on the crash pad, a few rounds of matwork, randori (sparring), and finish off with newaza uchikomi (matwork drills). There would be days when I just was not feeling it. Maybe it had been a long week at work. Maybe I was sore or mentally tired.

Instead of not going to practice, I would mix it up. I might just come in and do 500 throws that day. Maybe I'd do all matwork.

That's what I'm doing at this very minute. It's been a pretty exhausting month, flying to conferences, talking to people about our educational software.

Hey! Don't tune out just because I said educational software. It is completely awesome and some of it is even completely bilingual. You can learn math, history and even a second language all at the same time. Don't be such a wimp. Check it out!

Get Aztech: The Story Begins

 So, I'm writing a blog post and while I'm at it telling you to get our games.

Judo also taught me to be honest about how effective my work was

I knew someone who lost at a major tournament and, crying, turned to me and said she could not have trained any harder.  She was working out 6-8 hours a day. She worked at a health club and said she taught aerobics classes, ran on the treadmill 45 minutes every day, did at least a half-hour a day of weightlifting, taught spin cycling classes.

I tried pointing out that none of that was judo and she responded, "But I work SO HARD!"

I realize that writing a post like this probably won't get more than a few if you to check out our games, any more than just doing throws on the crash pad is an effective way to train for competition. Still, it is something and it helps.

I also realize that some things, like those endless tech meetups I'm invited to where people pitch their idea for electric underwear or something equally useless are a complete waste of my time, because I'm past that point, just like the woman doing the cycling classes was past the point of those being useful for her. That's a post for another day, though and now that I am less burned out, I'm going to go back to answering those emails.

Did I mention that Maria and I wrote a parenting book? You can get it here for only $1.99

Buy it here

What Judo Done Right Can Teach You About Business

Oddly, I found myself having the exact same discussion twice. The first time was with a group of people who had flown in for training and we were discussing effective vocational rehabilitation (the program that puts people with disabilities back to work).

I said,

As an employer, I don't care if you broke up with your boyfriend, your child got the chickenpox, you were up all night studying for exams. I just don't care. This business largely runs on fixed deadlines - the bid is due  February 24th, close of business, Eastern Standard Time -  and if you get it in one minute late, they won't accept it. So, if you don't show up to work when it's crunch time, someone has to cover for you. You do that three times without a DAMN good reason and you're fired. I can guarantee you that my idea of a damn good reason is probably a lot stricter than yours - it better involve somebody's death, or, at the very least, blood, bones sticking out or a trip to the emergency room. Your kid is sick? Guess what, I started this business with three kids and had a fourth one while I was building it up. (Not, as Justin Flores always contends, giving birth on the floor of my office nor on the judo mat while simultaneously strangling my opponent with the umbilical cord - he exaggerates.)

The point is this, a very valuable trait to employers is that you can get your shit together enough to show up every day. Find a babysitter for your kids, schedule your studying and take some Nyquil, whatever you need to do, but when the push is on - get your ass in here. As Dr. Jacob Flores often said about coaching,

I can't put in what God left out.

Meaning, he could teach skills but if the person did not have the innate talent or motivation, there was nothing he could do about that. The same is true about business. I can teach someone SAS or how to interpret a Kaplan-Meier curve. Not knowing how to do something is no big deal, you can learn. Being unreliable, though, is the kiss of death as far as making it in business with me is concerned. One of the main points I emphasized in training was developing "soft skills" in employees - showing up when expected, not being on Facebook for hours at work - that sort of thing.

The very next day, I was talking to Jim Pedro, Sr. and we got into a discussion on coaching. He brought up a couple of times when Ronda was injured - she landed on her head and thought she might have a concussion, another time, she had dislocated her elbow in a match, won the match, fought a few more rounds in the tournament and then practiced at a training camp for several days. At the time, she hated him and thought he was the meanest person on earth, but now she knows she can fight through anything. He said,

I tell these players - no one cares if you have cancer, no one cares if you're injured, if your mother died - if you lose, that is all anyone remembers. Athletes are always looking for an excuse to lose and you have to not give it to them. They need to know that there is never an excuse to lose. There is no excuse. You can fight through anything. Obviously, if they are going to aggravate that injury so much it is going to become career-ending, you don't have them to do it. In 90% of the cases, though, if it just hurts, they're sick, it's some personal problem - get out there and fight. I make them do it because I am trying to help them, whether they realize it or not. What do you think, on the day of the Olympics, the world title fight, it's going to be guaranteed everything is going great for you? So you make them fight even when they don't feel like it so that when that day comes, they know that no matter what the conditions they can fight and they can win. 

There is an assumption that judo, karate and other martial arts teach people discipline and that they develop all sorts of useful skills and attitudes that translate to other areas of life. That is only partially true. Martial arts (and sports in general) *can* develop those traits, but they often don't, because too often people take the same attitude in their sport that they later adopt in business - "It's too hard, you're just mean to make me do it."

So, you can learn a lot about success in business from judo, but that doesn't mean that everyone will.

Are you smarter than a fourth-grader?

As we were leaving for school this morning, my daughter, Julia turns to me and says,

"My coconut shampoo is good luck. Usually I have a great life, but lately even more things have been going good than usual. You should really try it."

Lessons learned from Julia:
1. Life really is great. We live in a beautiful place, the weather is lovely, the fires have been put out, we have more than any reasonable person could ever want.
2. When you find something that makes your life better, share it.

This is not going to be one of those syrupy sweet essays on "reasons to be happy." I read an entire book on that topic when I was in the middle of Indiana with nothing to do (I believe those last two prepositional phrases are redundant). The book should have been titled, "Reasons to be happy if you have the IQ of a pineapple."

Julia's advice was as different from that book as the difference between telling someone to be happy by thinking of puppies and actually giving someone a puppy.

Having learned this from Julia this morning, here are some things on the Internet that improved my day today.

Good blogs.
I confess. I rarely read blogs. Most of them are about the boring lives of people I don't know.

"Today it rained. I walked the dog and then I ate an apple. Then Al Gore came over and beat me with a stick for wasting all the technology that went into the Internet on drivel like this. "


The Savvy Entrepreneur - is a welcome change. The recent posts on avoiding procrastination are highly recommended. I agree completely with her take on marketing as well. I get so tired of these small business sites that act as if the key to business success is scoring high on search engines. If you are interested in small business, this blog is worth a read.

Tom Peters - is my favorite management author of all time. His mantra of,

"If it works, do more of it. If it doesn't, cut it out."

has been a guide for how I run my business and for every judo organization in which I have held office. The world is full of people who are afraid to take action because the guy sitting next to them might give them a dirty look. Tom Peters is a breath of fresh air.

Great sites
I yahoo everything. I have been on yahoo so long I actually have my first name as an email address DrAnnmaria@yahoo.com .

If you aren't a member, go to My Yahoo and sign up.

Perhaps some background is necessary. My life gives real meaning to the term "Road Warrior". Between travel to conduct evaluations, review grants, do on-site training and for judo camps, tournaments, clinics and meetings, my longest single stretch at home in the past 19 years has been for six weeks. I go through about a laptop a year. In addition, there are three desks and six computers in my house.

So... the services yahoo provides on-line, like bookmarks of your favorite sites, a notepad where you can keep your to-do list are indispensable to me. I never know which computer I will be using or what city I might be using it in. I can't decide if the notepad or calendar is my favorite. I do like the fact that the calendar emails me to remind me about meetings and sends a text message to my iPhone. I like the local Yahoos so I can look up wherever I am. There is website hosting, an HTML editor, you can customize your page (so at least one thing will be constant no matter where I am).

Unbelievably, all of this is free!

-----------------REQUIRED JUDO TIP ------------------------------
Build a bigger repertoire, both standing and on the mat. Most people do the same two or three techniques over and over. When you come to practice and there is only you, a child two-thirds your size, an old man twice your age and two yellow belts, pull out a crash pad and do every throw you know on each one of them. Do moving uchikomi on each of them and see what throws give you trouble. Try to analyze what you are doing wrong. Do randori with each of them and try those throws that you usually cannot get on others of your skill and size. Do the same with your matwork moves. Let them pin you and you escape. Do matwork starting from on your stomach or all fours and attack from there. When you have weaker opponents, use this as an opportunity to work on your weak points. If you use it to work on your strengths then you are just a bully, plus you will still have those chinks in your armor.