Time management lesson from a Jiu-Jitsu champion

Time: once it is spent, you can't earn it back.

Time is the most valuable commodity there is, for the obvious reason that, once time is spent, you can’t have it back.

For the last four days, I have, as a guest here in my Dana Point, CA home, the best time manager I know: my friend Bruno Fernandes.

We train Jiu-Jitsu together since we both were blue belts; he was 18, I was 23.

So I was able to follow closely how well he managed to attend to one of the best medicine universities in Brazil (UFRJ) and kept achieving high level results in Jiu-Jitsu–being three times world champion as a brown belt, for example.

If not enough, in the same period Bruno surfed whenever there were good waves, and partied whenever there were good parties–that is, always.

He didn’t lose such a skill.

Currently, Bruno is an Assistant Professor at respectful McGill University, in Montreal, Canada, where he runs a Gracie Barra school; plus, he is a Gracie Barra Canada Regional Director, and still travels all over the world for surfing, snowboarding and for attending to medicine congresses. He also was the one who awarded UFC champion Georges St-Pierre his Jiu-Jitsu blackbelt, and he often help him preparing for a fight. Besides some other important, time-consuming projects we’re working on together.

How’s that possible?

Swimming is the answer

Myself, Phil, Bruno and Renzo Gracie in a meeting we had in California last week. If time is life's major secret, Bruno has the key.

From 3 to 15, Bruno was a swimmer. He used to swim as much as two hours a day, every day, plus warm-up. Not counting the competitions, almost every weekend. After he stopped as a teen, he couldn’t stand swimming anymore.

I asked him what this long period “counting tiles” has taught him. “I learned swimming is too boring,” he answered, half joking.

I saw it differently: spending so much time doing something he didn’t like as a kid, he learned time can’t be wasted.

If my logic is right, that’s the reason Bruno’s so effective on whatever he does. He focuses in a way he spends the less time possible to accomplish a certain task. This way he’s able of doing several different things in parallel, and have all time he needs to do what he enjoys doing.

Your parents were right, after all: swimming is very good. Even if the best lesson you can take from it is not to waste time.