I risked death to share THIS lesson about engineering mastery

In the company of giants - a weekend of transformation and challenge.

The taste of blood permeated my senses. Sweat drenched my clothes and burned my eyes. I couldn’t speak. Exhaustion radiated from my lungs. The attacker used his legs to smash my abdomen with devastating force. Instinctively, I knew the end was near so my body delivered a wave of panic to keep fighting. THEN his arm slid around my neck. Despite my flailing, the choke grew tighter. Darkness invaded my peripheral. tap tap tap. The attacker retreated. Blood flow returned to my brain. The pressure on my stomach was removed. Freedom.

I spent a weekend training with 40 of the most savage jiu jitsu competitors across North and South America. The goal: intense training to prepare our competitors for the upcoming jiu-jitsu world championship. I ventured to Raleigh, NC for a weekend at the G13 Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu headquarters and walked away with a life-changing lesson on self-improvement.

“Iron sharpens iron”, as the saying goes. If you want to be the best, you must train with the best. Our human psychology requires a constant reminder to push harder than we want to - a necessary reminder to overcome our physical and mental wiring forged through millennia of evolution. In other words, humans taper their effort once our place in the status hierarchy is confirmed.

There’s another saying - “if you’re the best in the room then you’re in the wrong room”. The effort drop-off at the top of the hierarchy is even more severe because every improvement now requires groundbreaking effort, persistence, determination and grit.

Seeing is believing and my weekend training jiu-jitsu showed first-hand the importance of an amazing team. Whoever is “the best” on their team better hope they have a damned good team because if you’ve seen further than others it’s because you’re standing on the shoulders of giants.

Professionally, we tend to settle and it happens shockingly fast. Accept the job. Grind tickets. Direct deposit. Ramp up on an unsupported version of AngularJS and Python 2 because that’s the legacy project you were assigned.

As a software engineer, where are you on your career journey? Are you still hungry to grow, improve and dominate? Are you still learning? Relaxation is the mindset that initiates career death.

Who are your training partners? Are you surrounded with sharp engineers and remarkable leaders? Every person on the team should help you improve at something. On the mats in Raleigh, no one specific competitor knew everything. Yet the room was filled with 1000’s of years of jiu-jitsu knowledge so there was high likelihood each person could offer one tip, one trick or one observation to walk away a stronger competitor.

It’s not easy to live in a pool of sharks. But remember, the children’s game is called “sharks and minnows”. If you’re not one, you’re the other.