“The Fighter’s Mind: Inside the Mental Game”

“What’s weird about this book is that I can’t really imagine anyone reading it without being much interested in fighting. What’s REALLY weird about THAT is that I don’t have much interest in fighting. Not on this level, anyway, with descriptions of people I’ve never heard of doing things that are difficult to imagine. Just trying to understand what’s going on, my recent Google search history must look like that of a guy prepping to street fight his way across South America. The long way.

What I WILL say is that there are some really interesting insights in this book that apply to a hell of a lot more than fighting. To everything, really. Which serves to make the point made in just about every book, something about how fighting is a universal language and takes us back to our roots and so on and so on. But honestly, there’s some stuff of value in here to the complete non-fighter.

Because I don’t want to ruin the whole book by summarizing it, I’ll just talk about what I found to be one of the more interesting ideas in the book, and based on that you can decide if it’s worth your time to look through the rest.

One thing a lot of the interviewed fighters agreed on was the idea of attacking someone where they are strongest. Let’s take this out of the realm of fistfighting for a minute.

Let’s say you’re a warlord. And I’m a warlord. I built a huge fortress that I claim is impenetrable. Nobody has broken down the doors in a hundred years. Nobody’s even gotten close.
Now, you’re going to attack me, and you’re faced with a choice. Most would say, Okay, the gate is impenetrable. Let’s go in the side door. But what a lot of fighters would tell you, and chess players and ping-pong players and all kinds of weirdos profiled in this book, is that you should come right through the front door. Crazy, I know. But the thing is, if you enter the fortress by digging a tunnel underneath, you still have to beat me once you’re inside. It’s going to be tough. I still think the front door is impenetrable, and though you’ve worked around it I still have that mental security blanket. If you manage to come in the front door, however, everything I thought I knew about how the battle would go is destroyed. I was expecting you to go around, or to subvert my defense. But instead you came right through, ran right over the top of my best weapon, and now I have no confidence in anything.

In the world of mixed martial arts, you can kind of think of there being the worlds of stand-up fighting and ground fighting. If we were fighting, you an expert wrestler and me coming from a boxing background, you would assume that I was going to try and beat you with punches and to stay off the ground however I could. So your game plan would be to get me on the ground, even if it meant eating a few punches. But if I know that’s your strength, imagine if I decide that I’m going to take things to the ground right off, and for the first few minutes I manage to hold my own. The round ends, and then we both go back to our corners, but you go back knowing that I’m not afraid of the best weapon you have.

It’s a lesson that applies to a lot of things, I think. I don’t think of myself as a person who is often frustrated, but in looking at it I think that a lot of the times I DO feel frustrated it’s as a result of being stymied by something that lies within my strengths. If I make one out of every 15 shots in pool, it doesn’t faze me because I don’t expect to make ANY. But if I try to spell the word “rhinoceros” ten times in a row, and every single time I see that red squiggly line appear beneath it, I’m going to start thinking something’s wrong. I’ll be wondering if I’m not the speller I once was. I’ll be thinking about “rhinoceros” the next time I go to spell “diplodocus” and feel completely sure that I’m going to fail.

It’s a really great tool to be aware of, that in life you’re going to fail at things you’re good at, and it would behoove a person to be very aware of that and not be overly sensitive.

There are probably half a dozen lessons like that in the book. So if it’s of interest to you, and if fighting is at least not a hindrance to your reading it, then I say go for it.

If the fighting is still completely nonsensical and barbaric, you might try the author’s other book, A Fighter’s Heart, which is more about explaining that inexplicable: the Why.

Oh, and also, Marcelo Garcia is a guy mentioned in the book. Here’s a brief video that goes a long way to explaining what’s so difficult to capture in words, especially at about 4 min 50 when he’s rolling around with a guy who is WAY bigger (even non-fight-fans can probably appreciate this, and it’s more akin to wrestling than fighting. No blood 🙂 ). It’s like watching someone wrestle a pile of snakes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AY8JlJZBgCk