The Most Valuable BJJ Skill From John Danaher

Grappling coach reveals the most valuable skill that successful BJJ athletes have

Location: Lake Nona, FL.

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

What’s the most important, most valuable skill that a BJJ athlete can have? John Danaher believes it isn’t any complicated submission technique chain or guard passes. It isn’t even courage or being ready for challenges. The legendary coach says that it’s actually something much simpler: persistence.

Although this may seem like a simplistic answer, persistence is both difficult to learn and hard to maintain. By pursuing your goals with relentless determination and not wavering in the face of adversity, you will be able to achieve success in your sport – something more elusive than mere technique mastery.

Successful athletes don’t just possess a mastery of techniques; they also possess the drive and focus needed to persist when times get tough. That’s why John Danaher considers persistence the most valuable skill for any aspiring BJJ athlete.

Directly from the source

“The one indispensable virtue [among athletes] is persistence. The ability just to stay in the game long enough to get the result. Most people see it as a kind of simplistic doggedness where you just show up every day. That’s not it. The most important form of persistence is persistence of thinking; which looks to push you in increasingly efficient, more and more efficient ways of training. Famously, people talk about the idea that the hardest work of all is – hard thinking. And they’re absolutely right.“

“Coming into the gym and just doing the same thing for a decade isn’t going to make you better. What’s going to make you better is progressive training over time, where you identify clear goals – marked out in time increments… Three months, six months, 12 months, five years… And build those short term goals into a program of long term goals. Making sure that the training program changes over time.“