Tuesdays With Brock: The Fighter's Mind by Sam Sheridan

This is a great book, really really interesting. Sheridan's a hell of a writer. I liked his last book, A Fighter's Heart, which I reviewed here a few weeks ago, but I might like this one even more. He interviews a bunch of fascinating guys: Dan Gable, Freddie Roach, Mark DellaGrotte, Marcelo Garcia, Ricardo Liborio, Pat Miletich, Rory Markham, Andre Ward, Virgil Hunter, Randy Couture, David Horton, Kenny Florian, Frank Shamrock, Josh Waitzkin, Greg Jackson, John Danaher, and Renzo Gracie. Most of these men are martial artists, all of them are genuine tough guys. Sheridan's smart and honest and he takes us with him as he tries to learn what these gurus have to teach about mental toughness.

Some of the lessons are technical. Frank Shamrock: "The mental side is broken into 3 areas or levels. One: the idea, the visualization or conceiving side . . . I play it out in my head a bunch of different times, seeing ways it could go. . . . The second part is replicating, just practice. . . . The third part is doing, and every time you do it you get better. . . . So, one, two, three, and I end up with a result, but then I evaluate it. I think about changing what I did."

Some of the lessons are experiential. Almost all of these guys testify, from their own lives, about the value of experience, essentially agreeing with Malcolm Gladwell about 10,000 hours of experience equating to expertise. Sheridan: "How does that process happen? How do you get to where you can think three or four moves ahead of everyone?" Liborio: 'It's just knowledge, man. It's the same for everyone."

And some of the lessons are more philosophical. Sheridan's line about the difference between the intensity of Dan Gable, the famous wrestler, and the intensity of Josh Waitzkin, the chess prodigy/tai chi master/jiu jitsu student, stuck with me: "[Waitzkin] blazes for his "ten thousand hours" with pure gameness. Sure, he's gifted, but he's immensely driven underneath his sunny exterior. There's a subtle difference between say, Gable's intensity, which feels joyless, from a deep relentless place. Josh's intensity is easier, colored with excitement. It's playful."

That's a theme in this book: the interconnectedness of play and work. You see it show up in so many of the masters that Sheridan studies.

Danaher, a top jiu-jitsu instructor who used to teach philosophy at Columbia, says: "The single definitive feature of the uberathlete is a sense of effortlessness in a world where most men grunt and strive and scream. It comes easy to the best, and what creates that? I think it's a sense of play. No fear or anxiety about their performance."

Couture talked about how he performed better in MMA, where he became a world champion, than in wrestling, where he kept losing in the Olympic Trials, because MMA was fun for him: “I realized I get way more nervous for wrestling than for fights. Way more keyed up. When I realized that, I thought, that’s odd. This guy could kick my head off, but I’m not worried about that at all. I’m having fun, I’m enjoying learning all this new stuff. I stopped and thought why the hell am I so nervous for the wrestling matches? I’d lost perspective, I was putting all this pressure on myself. It came down to one match, everything hinged on it, so I’d forgotten that I loved to wrestle and why I started wrestling—because it’s fun.” Couture did better because the nervousness went away when he was having fun. But how do you have fun in a high-pressure situation? Couture's answer seems to be to focus on learning, on growing, not on outcomes.

That makes sense to me, so long as you're learning about something you enjoy. Marcelo Garcia, the 170 lb. jiu-jitsu champion at ADCC: "I just enjoy it so much . . . I loved the energy, of matching with each other . . . even now I never say I am better than anybody, but I know I love jiu-jitsu more than anybody." And as a result, he's better at it than just about anybody.

So that's one of the secrets: do what you love, work hard at it, play hard at it, put in the time, and you'll get great at it, great enough and tough enough to perform well under pressure.

And Sheridan's book is full of wisdom. Read it. Study it. Play with the ideas it contains. Sheridan obviously loves "fighting", broadly defined. He's put in the time to learn about it from some of the best. If you love fighting too, then this book is totally worth your time.