The Laws of the Ring

by Urijah Faber

  From a social standpoint, like many (dare I say most) kids, I started college without a clue. As I found, it can sometimes be preferable—in the long run—to be the guy who starts at a disadvantage. My missteps enabled me to understand adversity, and to develop the persistence to stand up for myself and be my own advocate.

  Learning from your mistakes is not always a conscious act, but from here on out make a conscious effort to take lessons from your victories and your mishaps.

  The 9th Law of Power

  Understand Your Talents: the Competency Model

  I learned a valuable lesson about wins and losses during my years as a college wrestler. My sophomore year I won slightly more than half my matches (15–14) and many of those losses were by a point or two. More than a few were overtime or double overtime. I was so close. It was frustrating, and I watched video and racked my brain for ways to make up the difference. There had to be a formula that I could learn that would make up those very few points and give me the record I felt I deserved.

  My junior year (second year of eligibility) was the first year I qualified for the national Division I tournament. All those close losses from the year before had turned into close wins. What made the difference? Was it watching the videos and vowing to overcome my frustration? I really don’t think so. I’d gotten better, it was true, but the margin of victory was so slim that it was hard for me to pinpoint exactly what caused the change.

  One of the losses I had that year was to a wrestler from Boise State named Jesse Brock. I lost to him by one point, and I was incensed afterward because I felt I’d been ripped off by the referee. Brock was good, and I set a goal to beat him, and I felt cheated and powerless when I came up short.

  Two weeks later, Brock and I met again in the Aggie Open at UC Davis. I approached the match with fierce resolve and it paid off. I beat Jesse Brock—by one point in overtime.

  I was ecstatic. It was a huge win in my career, and it was made sweeter by the fact that I’d avenged a recent loss. But when the euphoria died down, I asked myself a question: Why does this feel so much better? Should this slimmest of victory margins—one single, solitary point—cause such a vast difference in how I felt about myself? How can a one-point victory and a one-point loss land with such a drastic difference on my psyche?

  This little bout of self-examination changed my outlook on wins and losses. It hit me that I needed to be proud of what I’d done in both matches, not just in the match I’d won. If I let myself remain devastated by the loss and ecstatic over the win, I wouldn’t be doing justice to the experience. I would be letting someone else’s judgment—something as random and external as a scoring decision—determine how I perceived myself.

  I had made some small adjustments since the match in which Brock beat me. I recognized his ability to defend the single leg shot on his right leg, and switched up the attack. His defense was his strongest attribute, so I was more calculated with the attacks and used better setups.

  This led me to a realization: Making those little adjustments didn’t require me to dwell on the negative emotions that come with experiencing a close loss. You don’t have to enjoy losing, but enjoy the experience and do your best. I came to the conclusion that I loved to win, but I could be proud of myself even if a scoreboard was telling me I was losing.

  One of my goals in writing this book is to explain the Laws of Power as guidelines to help you foster good habits in your push for a better lifestyle. Each of them taken individually will have some impact on your ability to develop better habits in dealing with life’s challenges; taken together, they should have a major impact.

  Consistency breeds good habits, but in fighting—and in life—bad habits can destroy promise. You can have a strong sense of purpose and a good plan, but unaddressed bad habits will keep you from your goal.

  When someone asks me when I knew I had a particular fight won, I usually don’t give the answer they want to hear. It’s not something that happens during the fight; there’s no “aha!” moment where everything comes together and I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I have defeated Jens Pulver. Fights are often a blur of movement and countermovement, and I operate inside the cage with actions and reactions that are subconsciously acquired through constant practice.

  Instead, the defining moment to me is often something you might find irrelevant to the actual event and it usually has something to do with self-awareness and being the master of my domain.

  A good way to illustrate one’s aptitude is with the competency model. There are four states of competency: conscious competence, unconscious competence, unconscious incompetence, and conscious incompetence. Understanding where you fall in these categories can help put you on the path to creating good habits.

  Conscious Competence

  I remember a great story that I heard one year at a wrestling camp during the summer of my junior year in high school. One of the coaches at the camp, Coach John, was talking about how proud he was of his twelve-year-old daughter, Cassie, who was selling Girl Scout cookies door-to-door one year. His daughter was young and, from his perspective, fairly shy. He hadn’t really been keeping an eye on the task, other than to make sure she was going to be safe throughout the process. Coach John, of course, did his part as an encouraging father, but he didn’t expect what was coming. By the end of the fund-raiser he was pleasantly surprised to hear that his daughter had not only been the leading salesgirl in her troop, but had set an all-time record for cookie sales in the region.

  When he sat down to talk with his daughter, he was shocked to hear that she knew exactly why she had done so well. It turns out that she had allotted a one-hour period every day to selling the Girl Scout cookies. During the allotted time she started walking from door to door and then came up with a better idea—she would start jogging from house to house. By jogging instead of walking, Cassie reached about three times as many households as she would have by walking the cookies around the neighborhood. On top of reaching more homes, she started asking for referrals at the houses. She would ask politely if there was anyone else that the customer could call who might like some cookies. If the answer was yes, she would wait patiently, always saying please and thank you regardless of their answer. Her success was calculated; she was completely aware of the steps she’d taken to achieve her goal. This is the condition everyone should strive to create.

  Conscious competence is the act of possessing the knowledge that you excel at something, and also the knowledge of why you excel at it. Being consciously competent allows you to do something correctly and also teach it to other people. Conscious competence flows outward to others. It also means you can identify when you begin to do something poorly, and you have the skills and the consciousness to be able to correct it. If Cassie wanted to share her strategy with the rest of the Girl Scouts, there is no doubt that she could easily have passed her system on to her peers. Knowledge of your success is priceless.

  Unconscious Competence

  Put simply, this is being good at something but having no idea why. Some of the most successful people go about their lives achieving great things through unconscious competence. In the fighting community, this seemed to be exemplified by one of my favorite fighters and good buddies Quinton (Rampage) Jackson. Rampage was one of the lucky fighters in our sport to be a coach on the UFC’s hit reality series The Ultimate Fighter. Not to pick on Rampage, but he didn’t seem to be able to pick fighters with potential when it came to coaching his first season of The Ultimate Fighter. Again, I could be wrong, but I imagine that if you had asked Rampage why he was such a great fighter, he might have had trouble pointing out exactly what it was (although you would probably get a hilarious story or reasoning). Often people fall into the trap of believing that a person’s talent equates with their ability to identify or teach that talent. Sometimes, that talent just sits there and doesn’t emanate beyond the individual. This is not exclusive to Rampage; there a
re tons of people in every field—athletics, chemistry, journalism, you name it—who are very good at what they do but can’t explain it. Their talent doesn’t extend beyond their reach. Rampage got a second chance to coach on The Ultimate Fighter. By his second season of coaching, Rampage had picked up some introspection and seemed to add some consciousness to his coaching regimen. It’s always best when you can pinpoint a problem. Still and all, being great and not knowing why is a much better scenario than the condition described below.

  Unconscious Incompetence

  Here’s the good thing about unconscious incompetence: It’s fixable. The trick is being made aware of the areas in which you are being incompetent without understanding the reasons. Habits born of unconscious incompetence might include something you picked up from your parents—something as minor as poor grammar or as major as malnutrition.

  I met Poppies Martinez at a fight in 2005 at the Tachi Palace Casino. Poppies grew up poor as a member of the Tachi Yokut tribe in a town near Fresno called Lemoore, where schools were not equipped with the resources to accommodate his severe learning disabilities. The casino, however, had drastically changed the economic conditions for every member of the tribe. It didn’t provide a better school system or a community ethos that valued education, but the profits from the casino allowed a college fund to be set up for every young person in the tribe.

  With his learning disabilities and the educational system’s inability to deal with them, Poppies was not a viable candidate for college. He had a lack of role models and a lack of desire to succeed academically as well. Under different circumstances, with an educational system far better than the one that existed on the reservation and a family that valued education, things might have been different in the classroom for Poppies. As it stood, though, the die had been cast by the time he reached his late teens. There was no need for a college fund for Poppies. This meant he was free to put his college-fund money toward other forms of training and self-improvement. He decided to put his toward establishing a career as a fighter.

  Poppies was an established fighter on the casino circuit when he introduced himself to me that day at the fight. He was the poster boy for the pre-UFC WEC, as the reigning Native American champion, and in the two fights of his I’d seen, I was impressed with his fire and fighting style. I also knew he had stamina and conditioning issues. Poppies started calling me periodically to express his desire to come to Sacramento and train at the gym I own and operate, Ultimate Fitness. He was ready to take the next step in his career, he said, and he knew that training with better people and in better facilities would help him reach his goals.

  However, every time he got close to making the move, something would happen. Most often it was an issue that arose with his then wife, with whom he was having problems. But as the weeks went by, with the promises continuing and no follow-through, it became clear that Poppies was afraid to leave the reservation. He was literally afraid that he would be unable to adjust to living away from his comfort zone.

  Finally, Poppies got up the nerve to make the move. He showed up with a friend to help him acclimate to what he considered the outside world.

  The transition from home to our gym was a difficult one for Poppies. His home environment had created many habits he didn’t even know he had. For instance, the crime rate was so high on the reservation that he was habitually fearful and distrustful of the people around him. When he got to our gym, he immediately noticed how nonchalant we were about our personal possessions.

  “Why do you guys leave your wallets lying around?” he asked.

  We explained that there were no thieves on Team Alpha Male. He looked at us incredulously and said, “If we did that at home, they’d be gone in a second.”

  He left his four children and a volatile, off-and-on relationship with his wife to come and train with us. He was clearly dedicated to his fighting career, but after he had been with us for about three months, I told him, “Poppies, you need to go home and see your children. We’ll be here whenever you decide to come back.”

  Poppies was an example of unconscious incompetence. When we first met, he was twenty-one years old but didn’t understand how different his upbringing was from other fighters’. Reservations have long been among the most destitute areas of our country. Incidents of teen pregnancy are often ten times higher on the “rez” than outside. Alcoholism, among minors and adults, is stratospheric. School dropout rates can exceed 80 percent. This was the environment Poppies was attempting to escape, but the prospect of entering a world he perceived as far more cultured and structured than the one he’d known on the rez filled him with trepidation. He had never given much thought to anything outside his limited sphere, and he didn’t fully realize how different his upbringing was until he got outside and saw a different world.

  Fighting was just about the only thing in Poppies’ life that made sense. It provided order amid the chaos. It didn’t take him long to realize he could be good, too—good enough to break out into another entirely new world, the world of world championships instead of Native American championships. At five nine and 170 pounds, he was strong and fierce.

  It was clear, however, that Poppies would only be as good as his habits, and if he committed to rounding out the blunt edges of his style, he could make a breakthrough in the fighting world. He possessed the right mentality and the right focus for the actual fighting part. He loved to spar, and he loved to grapple hard. But ancillary details needed to be addressed along the way. Because of his lack of success in school, Poppies had an idea that he was stupid, and he needed to rid himself of this belief. He had dealt with learning disabilities growing up, never having specialists to help him along the way. Learning was something that came easy to him in the MMA world and he was extremely resourceful and intelligent in a lot of different ways despite his lack of book smarts. He didn’t like to run, and he didn’t like to spend a lot of time drilling new techniques—both aspects of elite stamina training—but the most disturbing lifestyle issue was his diet.

  When I asked him what his main food was, he broke into a big smile and said, “Spicy Red-Hot Cheetos.” No lie—Spicy Red-Hot Cheetos. I tried to hide my disgust, but he must have noticed because he said, “Oh, and I eat at Jack in the Box, too.” He had grown up eating the cheapest and least-nutritious food available. Fast-food burgers, white bread, frozen dinners, school lunches, high-carb snacks full of high-fructose corn syrup. I wasn’t surprised when Poppies told me he had nearly died due to a burst appendix when was only eighteen. He had been exposed to very few fruits and vegetables. And those he had tried he wasn’t interested in eating again.

  I took this as a challenge. As with most every other lifestyle choice, I’m pretty fanatical about my diet, and I believe I get a lot of my strength and durability from the food I put in my body. I take diet very seriously, and seeing Poppies repeatedly toss garbage into his body made me cringe. It was a bad habit that was getting in the way of his purpose. For him to compete, change was needed.

  But like many lifelong habits, this was difficult to break.

  I’d give him tomatoes.

  “I don’t eat that, bro.”

  I’d give him lettuce.

  “I don’t eat that, bro.”

  This was frustrating, and the more difficult he became the more intent I was. I definitely needed to take a new approach, and one day it dawned on me: He’d turn down any fruit or vegetable he had tried in the past. The routine was almost reflexive. If he’d had apples before, he refused to eat them. If he’d had carrots before, he’d refuse to eat them.

  Okay, Poppies, I thought to myself. I think I’ve figured out a way to make this work.

  There are a lot of fruits and vegetables in this big wide world. I didn’t have to focus on the common ones. If I brought Poppies something he’d never seen before—kale or acorn squash, say—he couldn’t refuse it by telling me he didn’t eat it. How would he kno
w he didn’t like it if he’d never seen it before?

  It worked. I’d prepare something he hadn’t seen before and—perhaps to please me—he’d eat it. I would hide stuff, too—mix zucchini into eggs or spinach into meat. In the process, Poppies discovered a taste for “unusual” vegetables. Once he did, he saw a huge difference in how he felt and performed. Once he saw the results, the rest was easy. Something he was originally forced to do became something he wanted to do. The bad habit was broken and replaced with a great habit.

  Changing his diet changed his life. I firmly believe what we put into our bodies is that important. Just as my brother, Ryan, has been able to maintain a more stable mental state through diet and exercise, Poppies’ new diet has made him healthier, both physically and mentally.

  Poppies talked about his people a lot. It was partly because our world was so different from his; he felt the need to explain those differences to us. Little things related to bigger things. Our lighthearted needling of each other always got him talking about the attitudes of his people. But I quickly learned that people and place were intrinsic to who Poppies was as a human being. To paraphrase the old saying, we could take Poppies out of the reservation, but we couldn’t take the reservation out of Poppies.