Too much chocolate, as good as it can taste, will make you sick.

Too much training, as much as people say “more is better,” can cause you some serious joint damage, like it did me. The picture above is one of my two artificial hip joints, now more than a decade old.

Many of my peers are enjoying their new hips too, although let me tell you, there’s NO PLEASURE in what leads up to a hip replacement. It’s all discomfort and pain, back, leg, and hip pain, loss of movement, and a slow and agonizing realization that you’re dreading the walk to the car, to the store, through the airport, and/or anywhere (forget running to catch a ball, backpacking, or performing martial arts at a high level).

But the great news about hip pain is it’s your hips! It’s not your neck! Or lower back. This is a joint that can be replaced and, literally, give you your life back. 

Now let me ask you, what’s the equivalent of the worn out hip joint to too much focus on “business?” What wears out when you do things, over and over, that have the potential to wear out parts of you that are both hard to find and costly to repair? I see it all the time in martial arts school owners. 

They wear out their passion. When school owners get caught up in the trap of sales, sales, sales —they wear out their sense of mission and intent and purpose. So my organization, The 100. —is fast becoming the repair shop for career-inspiration-replacements. The work can’t be seen in an x-ray, but it can be found in the bounce of the step in people formally hobbled by a focus on endless sales and membership campaigns, giving pizza parties and ice cream socials, looking at every student as just another pay-day, and losing their focus on the here and now. 

On the cover of Black Belt Magazine —and on so many MMA mags, at the seminars and conventions, and in print and image and video, we see the modern “warriors” of the international martial arts community. They grimace; they hold knives; they take stances; they pose for the cameras, cutting the throat, kicking the groin, punching the face, and choking the bad guy; they wear camo and army boots; and their t-shirts sport skulls, tigers, and often violent iconography. 

These are “our” warriors —in our profession.

But not a one of them is a warrior for anything that comes close to anything that matters, anything that actually makes positive change in the world, anything worth ANYTHING in today’s complex, violent, unjust world. Not one of them —or one of us —holds a candle to the likes of Mother Jones. 

Mother Jones was a warrior, fearless, determined, and she stood up for the rights of others —-and against a world that held women in very low regard —against a world dominated by opportunists —and against a political system that fought her just about every step of the way. 

Worker’s rights? Labor laws? The minimum working age? Mother Jones.

I urge you to read about her —and people like her —and start to rethink what a warrior is, what role a warrior in today’s world might/should play. Laugh at the posing, the militarism, and the hyper-masculinity of today’s martial arts warriors ——-and don’t catch yourself playing that game or role. Stand up for the stuff that really matters. Define the ultimate warrior by his or her compassion, her mission, his purpose. 

Do this and you will be a founding member of a new, enlightened, progressive, relevant kind of martial arts instruction. With one small “turn of your wheel” you could be a part of a new kind of leadership delivered thru the things/education martial arts teachers study —and impart to their students (and live). 

This is the kind of warrior-education that I want the 100. identified with. This is what I’m about. How about you?