"From one thing, know ten thousand things." — Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings
You can't fake mastery.
I watched Wick is Pain, the behind-the-scenes documentary on the John Wick series. There's footage of Keanu Reeves at 57, training for months before filming. Not weeks. Months. Jiu-jitsu four days a week. Firearms training until his trigger finger calloused. Choreography sessions where he drilled the same sequence until his body broke down. Then he'd show up the next day and drill it again.
His hands taped. Body bruised. Running the same moves hundreds of times until they looked effortless on screen. Not because he couldn't hire a stunt double. Because that's not how mastery works.
The directors came up the same way. Chad Stahelski and David Leitch started as stunt performers in the 90s. They spent years as coordinators. Paid their dues as second-unit directors. Then someone finally gave them a shot at the big chair. No shortcuts. No skipped rungs. Just relentless drilling of fundamentals until opportunity met preparation.
Watching that process unfold, I recognized something. This is the same pattern I see everywhere now. Every world champion jiu-jitsu practitioner I train with. Every elite founder I mentor. Every master craftsman I study.
Then I picked up the Book of Five Rings again. Musashi's 400-year-old text on swordsmanship. The same principles stared back at me. How you do anything is how you do everything.
Elite performers across wildly different fields and centuries share the same five daily habits. Not productivity hacks. Deep behavioral patterns that transcend disciplines and time itself. If you're not drilling the fundamentals, you're not building the capacity for greatness. You're ensuring your own mediocrity.
The Five Universal Habits of Elite Performers
Once you see the pattern, you see it everywhere. Five habits:
- Early rising with structured morning routines
- Rigorous prioritization of sleep and recovery
- Consistent daily physical movement
- Mental rehearsal and pre-visualization
- Continuous learning, reflection, and adaptation
These five habits are drilling practices. When I drill an armbar in jiu-jitsu, I'm not learning one submission. I'm learning attachment, joint control, and leverage. Keanu's months of drilling built the capacity to adjust choreography on the fly. Elite performers drill these fundamental habits the same way. The discipline to maintain these patterns is the same discipline required to master any craft.
Start with the morning.
Morning Routines That Set Up Success
"Victory is reserved for those who are willing to pay its price." — Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Elite performers start early. 4am. 5am. 6am at the latest.
Jocko Willink wakes at 4:30am. He posts a photo of his watch to Instagram.Then he trains. Weights, cardio, whatever the body needs that morning. By the time most people hit snooze, he's already locked in. His Instagram feed is a testament to his discipline.
I'm not Jocko. My morning routine is pretty garbage. I'm in a night owl phase. Since I've been focusing on blogging, I've skewed nocturnal. I know I'm cycling out of peak performance. That's how these patterns work. You build them, maintain them for months, then life shifts and they fall apart. You have to rebuild them. I'll get back to mornings. But, I'm not there.
When I was at what I consider the current high watermark for my career, I was waking up at 4:30am. Lifting weights at the gym. The cold iron in my hands. Meditating in the sauna after my last set. Then jiu-jitsu at 6am. By the time I stepped on the mat, my arms were already cooked. Lactic acid still burning from deadlifts. I couldn't muscle through anything. Every escape, every sweep, every submission had to come from leverage and timing. When your strength can't bail you out, technique becomes mandatory. After class, I'd grab coffee with friends. By 9am when I started work, I had already covered my physical training, mental practice, and social connection.
Morning exercise aligns with natural circadian rhythms when testosterone peaks and cognitive function is sharpest.
The morning sets everything up and makes the rest of the day easier. But it only works if you slept.
Sleep and Recovery
"The general who wins the battle makes many calculations in his temple before the battle is fought." — Sun Tzu, The Art of War
I bragged about sleeping four hours a night through my 20s. Entrepreneur badge of honor. It was also the period of my life where I had the worst mental health.
Now that I'm over 40, getting enough sleep isn't a nice to have. It's mandatory for me to feel well and high functioning.
At my gym, we wear Whoop bands. Biometric tracking. The difference between six hours and eight hours sleep on my whoop is the difference between a red recovery and a green recovery. Red shows decreased heart rate variability. My body's physical KPIs screaming that I'm overloaded. Research confirms what my body tells me: sleep deprivation significantly impairs athletic performance, cognitive function, and recovery (Sleep Foundation).
Brain fog, slower thinking, worse reaction time. I hate feeling dumb.
On the mat, I see a 20 to 30 percent decrease in my stamina and work output when I'm in the red. I'm missing the cardiovascular capability to roll at my normal tempo for all six rounds. I have to take rest rounds off or play completely defensively. I never feel older than I do when I'm training unrecovered.
My head coach Corey (in his 30s) trains BJJ five days a week plus strength and conditioning. He can handle the occasional late night and still teach a morning class at full capacity. Heather, who's in her 50s, looks at my sleep data and points out that my volume might be enough, but my consistency is killing me. When I go to sleep and wake up matters almost as much as the total hours. Her biometrics taught her that lesson years ago.
Even as a night owl, I strive for eight hours. Bed by midnight. Wake at 6am to help get the kids moving for school. Back to sleep until 8:45am.
Sleep sets up the morning. Movement maintains both.
Daily Movement for Brain Performance
"It is important to train yourself constantly in everyday life." — Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure
Your brain is a physical organ. Movement is its maintenance.
Keanu trained for months before John Wick. Not just for the choreography. For the mental clarity that comes from pushing your body past comfortable. You feel it. Research confirms: exercise improves cognition, memory, and executive function (PMC).
Training a combat sport is that it turns the volume down on all of life's other little problems. If you've spent 30 minutes of your day physically fighting for your life, your boss telling you that you need to put a coversheet on your TPS report barely even registers. My wife can tell when I haven't trained. I'm more irritable. Quicker to anger. She'll kindly tell me to go to the gym.
At 40, you have a choice. Be sore because you train, or sore because your muscles have atrophied from sitting looking at screens and now trivial exertions hurt.
Movement improves my work performance directly. If I'm struggling with a problem, I'll put GPT in voice mode and go for a long walk. I'll have it interview me about the problem and transcribe my solutions. The long walk clears my head. I can rubber duck through the problem and have the LLM output my thoughts when I'm back at my desk.
Four days a week, I train jiu-jitsu. The other days, I walk.
Movement clears the mind. Visualization sharpens it.
Mental Rehearsal and Pre-Visualization
"Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win." — Sun Tzu, The Art of War
I worked with a Navy SEAL veteran on a startup. He taught me that pre-mission, SEALs visualize every step. The breach. The movements. The contingencies. They run iterations in their minds until the mission feels familiar. Visualization activates the same brain regions as physical practice. Your nervous system can't tell the difference between vivid imagination and actual experience (National Library of Medicine).
My coach, Heather, a multi-time world champion, emphasizes the same approach to me after a loss. She lays out this framework for visualizing not just the moves. The entire experience.
Start by identifying your A-game. Your best techniques. The strategies that work when everything else fails. For me, that's pressure passing and submissions from mount. For you: a pitch, a demo, a difficult conversation. The things you've drilled until they're instinctive.
Now map the decision tree. If I go for a sweep, what counters might they use? For each counter, what's my next move? Map every response. Every branch.
You're compressing infinite complexity into maybe 13 moves you know cold. Jiu-jitsu has thousands of technique variations. You drill 13. If my opponent takes me off my game plan, I don't try to beat them at their game. I just work my way back to one of my 13 moves. I may not be better than my opponent across the entire problem space, but for those 13 moves and their transitions, I operate with advantage.
Then visualize walking through each variant. Start before the match. From the moment you arrive in the bullpen. The slap of a body hitting the mat, the roar of the crowd, a coach cueing his athlete. The smell of the gym. Your opponent warming up next to you. You step on the mat. The ref signals start. Your opponent grips. You initiate your A-game. They counter. You slow the iteration down in your mind, figure out the solution to that combat problem, flowing down your decision tree, continue the visualization through to a submission and the ref raising your hand.
You always win in the visualization. Your opponent counters your moves. They try to impose their game on you. They might have physical advantages. But you slow time, solve each problem, and continue until victory.
Run through that visualization again and again. Different opponents. Different counters. Different branches of the decision tree. By the time you actually compete, you're not nervous. You've already won this exact fight a hundred different ways. Your opponent doesn't know that you've Rick and Morty'd your way through the multiverse to this moment.
My first competition at blue belt, I hadn't learned the mental game. I can still remember the feeling of the adrenaline dump. You do not rise to the occasion. You fall to your level of training. Tunnel vision hits. Your field of view collapses and loses color, you're viewing the world through a straw. Time dilates. You feel like things are moving slower, but in reality you're moving faster, amplified by the molecular cocktail of courage you just mainlined. I lost my match. In the moment, it felt like I hadn't even done any jiu-jitsu. Later when I watched my tape, I saw myself accomplish a non-trivial amount of good jiu-jitsu. There's a reality distortion field in those moments.
I practiced the mind game that Heather taught me after that match. Two years later, when I walked onto the mats at IBJJF Masters Worlds, it felt no different than walking onto the mats at my home gym. Ready to have a challenging match with a trusted training partner. Training changes behavior.
I apply the same technique to pitching and negotiations. I rehearse my game plan extensively in the week leading up to it. By the time I walk into the room, my brain is primed. I respond faster, more efficiently, with composure.
Mental rehearsal prepares you for today. Growth mindset prepares you for tomorrow.
Build, Reflect, Iterate
"Today is victory over yourself of yesterday; tomorrow is your victory over lesser men." — Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings
I don't try to build big things all at once. I build small things every week. Each time I try new tactics, techniques, technologies. I'm refining my tools. Seeking feedback from mentors. Trying again. If you spend your life waiting to build the perfect thing, you'll never accomplish it. When the opportunity arrives, you won't have the experience required to execute.
But if you weekly build a small project you can complete in seven days, you'll have 30 to 50 chances to learn each year. Thirty to fifty times the experience you have now. Accuracy and upskilling by volume.
I learned systematic improvement from the late, great, Roland Lyle. He was the kind of instructor both feared and loved by his students. A dying breed I was lucky to study under in High School. He pushed us hard. He treated us as adults. He exposed us to important ideas through photocopied articles. Total Quality Management. Six Sigma. Toyota Production Systems. That experience stuck with me and influenced my career for the next 20 years. Small, continuous improvements compound over time into massive gains.
After every significant event, I perform retrospectives. Competitions. Hackathons. Product launches. I talk to other participants or coaches immediately after and take notes on what worked and what didn't work. Then I spend a few days reflecting on those thoughts while watching tape or documenting the experience. I edit down to final lessons and put together controls I can implement next time or a learning plan to develop a missing skill. Most importantly a share the results with others.
When our team built an AI startup in 72 hours back in 2018, I wrote down what worked and what failed. When I launched Bad Golf Business School, I captured the lessons on community building and volunteer burnout. Each retrospective updated my decision trees for the next iteration. That's how you get better.
Continuous learning is the meta-habit. The discipline that helps you optimize your routines. But knowing what to do and doing it consistently are different problems. There are two complementary training modes that help you build anti-fragile habits—deliberate drilling and ecological exploration. I'll break down that framework in detail in a future article.
Building Your Five Habits
"The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike, or touch the enemy's cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement." — Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings
The five universal habits:
- Early rising with structured morning routines — Front-load the day when your energy and focus are sharpest
- Rigorous prioritization of sleep and recovery — Eight hours isn't negotiable; consistency matters too
- Consistent daily physical movement — Your brain is a physical organ; movement is its maintenance
- Mental rehearsal and pre-visualization — Win the fight in your mind before you step on the mat
- Continuous learning, reflection, and adaptation — Build something every week; accuracy through volume
They're not secrets. They're not hacks. They're the price of admission to elite performance in any domain. The question is whether you're willing to pay it.
Here's how to start. Don't try to fix everything at once. That's how you fail. Instead, start with the smallest, most trivial version of exercise, something you'd be embarrassed to call a workout. Ten pushups. A five-minute walk. Something so easy you can't say no.
Do it for 30 days straight. No exceptions. No negotiations.
Working out unlocks everything else. Physical exertion exhausts your body and floods it with endorphins. That exhaustion creates a biological need for sleep. Sleep drives recovery and builds both cognitive and physical capacity. Mental rehearsal builds confidence. Confidence compounds into mastery.
No one started out in the top 1% of their field. But they all followed the same path to get there.
Now you're walking the same path they did. Building the capacity to perform under pressure. The discipline to show up when you don't feel like it. The confidence that comes from knowing you've done the work.
First you form your habits, then your habits form you. Drillers are killers. And you're about to become both.
Future you is grateful that you started today.