competitive generosity

No one advances alone. Even when your hand is raised, there are unseen grips holding you up—training partners who pushed the pace, coaches who refined the details, teammates who believed in you before you believed in yourself.

That’s why it matters who you root for.

On the mats, it’s easy to keep score in the wrong way. Who’s improving faster. Who’s winning tournaments. Who gets noticed. But that kind of comparison quietly steals from your own practice. You may be winning rounds, collecting taps, even collecting medals—yet still losing something essential.

Jiu-jitsu rewards presence. And presence disappears the moment envy enters the room.

When a teammate succeeds, it is not a subtraction from your journey. It is proof that the work works. Celebration sharpens the mind the same way gratitude sharpens technique—it aligns you with the process. You leave the academy lighter, more focused, more connected to why you started.

This is what speaks to the joy in training—about treating each round as an opportunity rather than a test. Reminding us that character is revealed in small moments, when no one is watching. Rooting for others sits at the intersection of both ideas. It is a technical discipline at the core of your being.

You don’t support people only because one day you may need them—though you will. You support them because jiu-jitsu is already hard enough without carrying resentment into the room. Because celebrating someone else’s breakthrough can rescue a difficult day. Because a rising tide truly does lift all belts.

Train with intensity. Compete with honesty. But when your teammate wins—on the mat or in life—smile, slap hands, and mean it.

That, too, is jiu-jitsu.