Talk Blogging

Imagine that you come home one evening with TONS of work to do on your computer and need to do quickly. As you pull into your driveway, you notice that the local phone company is putting in
underground cables in the front yard of both of your neighbors. No big deal since they’re not digging big holes in your lawn, right? In fact, you’re relieved that they’re not digging in your yard since that reduces the likelihood they’ll do any damage to your house.
So, as you settle in to do your work, you notice that your internet connectivity is gone. No internet, no work to do!
After yelling out a few expletives, you contact your cable provider to find out if your payment made it on time and it did. And after placing a trouble call and having the cable company show up at your house to fix the problem, you find out that the telephone guys, burying the phone cables in both of your neighbor’s front yards (not yours), only damage your cable, leaving both of your neighbors with uninterrupted internet connectivity and you stranded for 7-10 days.
Was it possible for you to plan for such an emergency?
Well, let’s rewind back about three months prior to that day to…let’s say…a conversation that you had with your coach where he instructed you to buy a laptop with wireless internet access. You told him that you have internet access at home and saw no immediate need for a full-time wireless capability. He told you to get it anyway and you said, ‘Ok…I’ll take care of it…tomorrow.’ And since tomorrow never actually happened, you’re now doing your work on a borrowed computer with a dial-up connection, asking yourself how this could’ve been avoided if you would’ve listened to and taken action on good advice.
What can I…uh…we learn from this and how does it apply to grappling? I learned that it’s easy to be hardheaded and to not take action when given good advice that’s meant to help you, not hurt you. I also learned it’s easy to think that putting off decisions today (like going to class, drilling those extra reps, getting and actually doing that off-mat cardio routine, reading my Wise Grappler Weekly Ezines, joining the coaching program, etc.) that appear to have no costs associated with them, but they do. The cost is stress, aggravation, inconvenience, loss productivity, a bruised ego, frustration, and possibly failure. And all of those things could’ve been avoided by taking action instead of procrastinating.
Hall of Fame College Basketball Coach Bobby Knight gave a great definition of discipline once that always stuck with me. He said,
‘Discipline is doing what needs to be done, when it needs to be done.’
As I look back on my decision to not get the computer, I was putting off my success. I neglected to have the discipline to do what needed to be done, when it needed to be done. And I see the same things happen with grapplers on the mat as well, especially at competitions. It’s always easy to see at competitions what people needed to do (get in shape or sharper technique), but so many were hard-headed and decided to ‘put it off’ until tomorrow; hoping they wouldn’t get exposed. But here’s a fact of life:
Being hard-headed and procrastination ALWAYS leads to exposure!
Well, I’ve been exposed and need to go buy a wireless network capability! What have you been ‘putting off’ that’s about to be exposed?
Paul M. Greenhill, ‘The Wise Grappler’, is the creator of The Wise Grappler System and author of The Wise Grappler Ezine, a weekly ezine that provides martial arts training and personal development tips for the older (over 35) and non-traditional martial artists. To learn more about ‘The Wise Grappler’ and to sign up for more FREE tips like these, visit his site at http://www.ihateyoungpunks.com or contact him at paul@thewisegrappler.com.
(c) 2007 Paul M. Greenhill
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