What’s Working Matters

There’s a common mindset among serious athletes: fix what’s broken, ignore what isn’t. It sounds efficient. Ruthless, even. You tell yourself, “The good stuff takes care of itself. My job is to fix the flaws.”

And at a glance, there’s some logic to that. In training, feedback tends to flow toward failure. You review the sweep that didn’t work, the pass that got stuffed, the moment you hesitated and paid for it. It’s easy to fall into the habit of treating every session as a hunt for weakness.

But this mindset, if left unchecked, can quietly poison your growth.

Because improvement in Jiu-Jitsu isn’t just about closing the gaps — it’s also about recognizing the threads of excellence that are already forming. Your passing might be sharp. Your timing on the back take might be clean. And yet you breeze past those wins, hungry to dissect the next problem. You shrug off the nod from a coach. You dismiss the roll that went well.

“That part’s fine. Let’s move on.”

But what you fail to realize is this: the things that are working — those elements of your game that are starting to shine — are not inevitable. They didn’t just happen. They emerged through discipline, attention, and hundreds of invisible corrections along the way. And they need to be nurtured just like anything else.

The path to mastery doesn’t just run through your weaknesses. It runs through your strengths too — the ones you’re often too focused to celebrate.

This doesn’t mean we indulge in hollow praise or become blind to flaws. It means we train with enough awareness to know what’s starting to click, and with enough humility to recognize that progress isn’t only measured in what you’ve fixed — it’s also measured in what you’ve built.

Sometimes, what gets you through the struggle is the quiet confidence that something is already going well. That there is order inside the chaos. That parts of your game are already moving in the right direction — and that your job isn’t just to correct, but to reinforce.

In high-level jiu-jitsu, the difference between good and great is not only who corrects more mistakes — it’s also who preserves and sharpens what already works.

So yes, work on the broken. But don’t forget to honor the functional.

What you’re building matters. And what’s working deserves your attention.