Circles of Competence

When I started wrestling at the tail end of my freshman year of high school, I was a fish out of water.

At age 13, I had plenty of hormones and nowhere to put them. Given that I was probably too small to play football, wrestling seemed like the right sort of outlet for this. Ultimately, it was technique more than testosterone that dictated how well I did during my matches, so I took wrestling practice (and repetitive drills) seriously.

By the time I was a senior, I won my wrestle-off to make the varsity team, and I was off to compete for the full year. By now, it was evident that I had a few strengths and weaknesses out there on the mats.

For one thing, I was a lot better at matwork—the stuff that happens on the ground—than I was at takedowns. I knew that if I could drag the match to the ground, I had a much better chance of scoring (and winning) than I did if things stayed up on the feet, where my takedown game wasn’t as strong.

This was a very conscious strategy employed by me and my coaches. It was clear that I would stay inside of my little circle of competence, and I would win lots of matches as a result.

I did well enough in my high school wrestling competitive “career”, winning about twice as many matches as I lost, never giving up back points, and making it to states in a very competitive 4-A division. I was happy with my accomplishments, but also wanted very badly to continue. In a way, I wished for another year of high school, but only so that I could wrestle more. In every other way, I was ready to be done with high school.

After a move to another city and a couple of years away from wrestling, I found judo at a university near me, and the rest is history, at least insofar as I’ve written a bit about it here:

Judo wasn’t really all that different from wrestling. There were takedowns, although judo focused on bringing the person’s back to the mat with force, whereas wrestling scored regardless of how you got them there. There was matwork, the part I really enjoyed from wrestling, too—but the submissions also made this part really different.

Instead of just pinning the person, the goal in jiu jitsu was to submit the other person, to cause them to give up. That changed the objectives around quite a bit—notably, it was okay to stay on your back in a match, at least if you had your legs in play.

When I first started competing in judo in 1997, I was very conscious that I had learned the ability to pin folks from wrestling. Now, you had to get around their legs in order to pin someone, a process commonly referred to today as passing the guard, so there was new stuff to learn here, but it was obvious that my core competence was still intact.

In other words, if I stayed inside my matwork circle, I could win more matches than I lost in judo. That’s more or less what I did for the first few years: I pinned a lot of folks, got pretty good at the rest of matwork and submitted a few others, and even started getting pretty good at a few throws.

That circle of competence had grown from pinning and turning people over, and it now included chokes and armbars. I was also stealth-competent in a few takedowns that weren’t as well known in judo, and so my circle began to expand slowly.

Now, a really interesting thing happened when I applied the same circle of competence principle in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ) matches: my circle shifted.

Before, the thing to do was to impose matwork on my opponents, who knew the takedown game really well. I could occasionally score with an unorthodox takedown, but clearly I had the advantage on the ground, so that’s where I tried to take most matches.

Now, I was swimming in a sea of sharks, so to speak. Everyone here was good on the ground; jiu jitsu is well known for its matwork.

Now, my most competent area (matwork) was the place where I had the biggest disadvantage. My strategy needed to shift if I wanted to win, and I definitely wanted to win.

I began to develop strategies centered around getting people to play my game, so that I could focus on where I was strongest. I thought of ways to trick people into standing up with me just for a few moments, and got pretty good at gamifying the rules, using them to my full advantage.

Judo and wrestling came together to overcome the groundwork of BJJ, and I won some pretty big tournaments on this basis. I had a pretty good competitive career, notching hundreds of wins in judo and jiu jitsu matches during a time when the sports were very young in the US, especially jiu jitsu.

Of all the lessons these experiences taught me, one that sticks with me the most is the idea that I can take something that’s my worst area in one context, then apply it in a different context, and have that be my strongest area. In wrestling, it paid to avoid tangling with takedowns too much, getting things to the mat quickly, but in BJJ, the opposite was true.

Nowadays, I think of it like this: staying inside of your circle of competence is like having a short-term superpower. This is the same lesson Pareto’s Principle teaches us, that you’ll get most of your benefits from a small amount of your activities.

You can win tournaments or get a raise at work with this superpower. However, it’s important to zoom out and not get stuck in that circle forever. So, while you can do great things by “staying in your lane”, you need to step outside of your circle if you really want to grow.

I was forced to step outside of my little protective shell, largely because I wanted to win matches. Eventually, I stopped trying so hard to win and started trying to improve my skill set overall, viewing competition more holistically, but I was quite fortunate that my desire to succeed also coincided with my ability to learn new skills.

You don’t need to compete in three different sports with overlapping skill sets in order to expand your own circle of competence. On the other hand, without something like that forcing you to shift and experiment, it’s easy to get stuck in a rut where life is just easier.

Finding that balance is the trick, isn’t it?

Have you found ways to expand your own circles of competence? Have you harnessed the superpower of staying in your lane to tremendous advantage? Let’s talk!