Open

The Big Five personality traits make up a framework that many psychologists find incredibly useful. Earlier in the week, I described my dad through the lens of one of those five traits: agreeableness.

If Dad’s main Big Five trait was being agreeable, maybe mine is being open.

Dad was open to some new experiences, to be sure. He wore half a dozen different career hats, in spite of teaching math and science for 28 years. I helped him with a few of these ventures, eventually learning how to have my own ventures that would stand on their own.

I come from a long line of Sam Smiths, many of whom seem to have been builders of some kind. My dad worked with me to create wooden toys we could sell, and prior to that, he built his own furniture to sell as a business when he wasn’t teaching (or, possibly, to escape teaching).

Still, Dad lived in his home state (South Carolina) for his whole life, though he did fly on a plane once for a domestic flight. I also remember being taken up in a Cessna once as a kid, though I can’t remember if Dad was with me on that thrilling little flight.

Were Dad’s entrepreneurial ventures a sign of his openness to new experiences, or were they more out of necessity? I’m not sure, but I can say for certain that necessity is not always the mother of invention for me.

What I mean is that I will often change gears after I get pretty good at something. I want to try to master whatever’s next, then move on to the next thing. I am open to these new experiences, at least in terms of mastery.

It was openness that led me to punk rock, where I found a way to resist that almost nobody in my state seemed to have found as compelling as I did. By looking different, I carved myself out from all of mainstream society—and to an extent you wouldn’t believe if you hadn’t lived through this time.

It sounds like a trivial fashion choice, but punk was a lifestyle for me in every sense of the word. It was a look that automatically made it impossible to get a job, lest you disguise yourself in some way. Yes, impossible. This was the early 1990s, and this was South Carolina.

Moshing was incredible. It allowed us to get a lot of our inner angst out into the world, venting and allowing us to persist in a society we didn’t particularly want to be a part of. Now here was a new experience I could enjoy.

Nonconformity for nonconformity’s sake got old after a few years. I was still swimming a contrarian current in the late 90s, but this time it was martial arts that really caught my eye.

In particular, it was this idea that no-holds-barred fighting was an incredible experiment that truly tested which arts were most effective, at least under the specific, preset conditions such a fight allowed—unarmed, one-on-one, and everyone knows when the fighting will begin. These are all things you can’t really count on in a self-defense scenario.

Was I open enough to go and fight myself? No, not really—but there are a few caveats.

I did end up fighting a watered-down version of no-holds-barred, where no striking to the face was allowed. Folks could still punch and kick to the body, both on the feet and on the ground. I also did some MMA sparring much later on, after the spectacle had evolved into a sport.

I also competed in hundreds of judo and jiu jitsu matches.

When the sport became mainstream, I was totally done being interested in what used to be NHB, but was now MMA (Mixed Martial Arts). Rules had cut in from the edges, and then athletes had figured out how to play to the rules. It was much less of an experiment to determine styles, and more like an NFL football game where everyone tries to use the rules as much as they try to win the game. Things only got worse from there, as toxicity pervaded and the lowest common denominator ruled.

It was this openness to new experiences that led me to judo in 1997, and to BJJ soon thereafter. It was necessity that made me want to run a business centered around these arts, though—just like my dad.

Still, I moved to a new city and state right at the cusp of adulthood. I drove around the country for a few years while teaching jiu jitsu. I slept on mats and floors and couches, and I loved every minute of this experience… until I didn’t.

The need to settle down seemed urgent, so I settled. Then, I bought a house.

This was certainly a new experience, even if it’s one that has been shared by tens of millions of Americans and hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Lame!

Only, it wasn’t lame. It was a new adventure, and so was selling that house and moving into a new one. So was growing and scaling a couple of businesses, and so has been writing here on Substack.