NOTE – on the surface this post is about sport, but that’s really not the focus at all.  Please stick with me and let me know what you think…

I’m in the middle of watching a rerun of the UFC 101 and I can’t help but think that these guys are insane.  While that’s probably obvious to many of us that would never dream of getting ourselves into that kind of situation, I’m not referring to the most obvious case to prove my point…

I’ve watched the first two bouts so far and in both case the losing fighters obviously came in with a fight strategy or a mental map on how they wanted to see the fight go.  And in both cases the fight went completely the other way, yet the fighters kept going with their original strategy.  The result, after a series of take downs in both fights, was the being awarded an easy decision that any judge would give them simply for being the perceived aggressor.

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
– often attributed to Albert Einstein

In the first fight I might concede that the fighter didn’t have much control over his fate and he simply got overpowered.  But he also didn’t try to do anything different and he allowed the judges to make the easy decision.  He needed to try to do something different to really show the judges that he deserved to win.  But he didn’t.

In the second fight the loser, a man that many might describe as the better fighter, came in with a strategy that it would be a stand-up fight and he fought tooth and nail to keep himself from being taken to the ground.  Except that he was taken to the ground repeatedly.  He didn’t sustain a lot of damage, but he was on the bottom and therefore was the perceived loser. He even had an opportunity about half-way through the final round to take the upper position and potentially inflict some damage on his opponent.  Instead of taking that advantage, he stood up.  And then got taken down again.

Both fighters lost because they didn’t change their strategies even after repeatedly being shown that they weren’t working.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m all for repeating things until you can’t learn any more.  Many of the major advances of our civilization have come about from people trying things over and over until they got it right.  But sometimes you only have so much time to change course, and if you act too slowly then you lose it all.

These fighters were both insane by the most common of definitions.  But of course many we know it was true because they were in the fight in the first place!

What can you learn from this that you can apply to your day to day life??

Related Posts

No related posts.