Last week I did a podcast (which should be out before the end of the year) and the host and I had an interesting discussion on ego.

Now generally, ego is spoken of as a negative thing when we speak of training and trying to become a better version of ourselves. Ego makes us do dumb things to prove how tough we are, how much of a warrior we are, or to show others that we won’t be beaten by them. A great many injuries, perhaps the majority of them, in BJJ stem from ego making someone do something they should not do.

Case in point. When I first started training with Megaton Dias, he had an assistant who was a good dude, as well as a good jiu-jitsuka. The guy always helped me, even while making me tap. After a couple of years, he moved on in life, and I continued training. Flash forward about 5 years, and he comes back. I am now a purple belt (as he was), but while I was not the same horrible and fat ass white belt I was when he was training, he still thought of me that way. So when I started handling him with ease, you could see he was disconcerted. At one point, we were rolling, and I was passing his guard. He was fighting as hard as anyone ever has. He was bound and determined that I would not pass. The problem was, I was passing because I was good enough to do so. As I was finishing up, he screamed out and rolled into a ball. Panicked, I went to him to see what happened. It turned out that he tore his groin muscle. He was so desperate to not lose to someone he saw as inferior, that he severely injured himself. Not only did that take him away from training, he never came back. That was entirely due to his ego. It was really sad.

That is the kind of thing that happens far too often, and holds us back from truly getting better. However, the truly tough thing is that we need the ego to some extent. The ego is what helps us to push through when things get tough in training. It helps us to not give in and accept failure or loss. The ego tells us to get back on the horse and show the other guy who is boss.

This is not to suggest some miraculous way around the problem. It is just one of those things that make you go “hmm”.