Workshop - Part 1

Rule

I have an almost-daily ritual, the rhythms of which have become indistinguishable from who I am. My study and community at Workshop Honolulu have affected me in ways that words will not capture. But, other than my marriage, jujitsu has taught me more about harmony than anything else. So it belongs here.

To unfold this story requires taking a few steps back.

Rules

When I was very young, I was diagnosed with severe Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). In the early 1990s, ADHD was much less diagnosed and well known in the United States. In first or second grade, a local news outlet came to my elementary school in New Orleans to do a special report on ADHD. Their primary B-roll was anonymized clips of me in class fidgeting. Along with my ADHD, I was one diagnostic point below qualifying for a diagnosis of Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD). Due to this, a psychiatrist and my school determined I had a learning disability and I was placed into special education programs. People close to me have told me that I display autism spectrum behaviors, though I have no diagnostic history with respect to that condition.

ADHD, ODD, Autism: these are all technical terms. They hardly capture what it means to live inside the experience of what the words describe. The people who were responsible for caring for me when I was young really struggled. I was loud, impossible to focus, emotionally volatile, defiant. Many people described me as difficult and challenging.

As for my perspective. Life utterly confused me. My emotions felt like a maelstrom that could never be escaped. I felt highs and lows with such intensity that I would become unmoored. Internally, I had nowhere safe to hold onto. This compounded with a mind completely shipwrecked in the current educational milieu. Even today, sitting still and listening to someone talk for long periods of time without interaction is a physically painful experience for me, even with decades of discipline built up around the practice. Finally, the most painful feature was how mismatched I felt in relation to other people. I was an enormously sensitive child, deeply desiring social connection and safety, but the behavior of others was impossible for me to grasp. I could see from their reactions when I was doing things “wrong”, but I could not intuit with any reliability how to do things “right”. This relentless discrepancy, for a long time, ingrained in me a persistent sense of inferiority and weirdness, which led to feelings of isolation¹.

Throughout my childhood and early adolescence, I don’t think many observers would describe me as “succeeding”. Every year, I would barely earn grades that would allow me to move on to the next school year. Relationships with my peers were fraught with anxiety and misunderstanding. My body was overweight and resistant to physical exertion. I was lonely and sad.

But, in freshman year of high school, a new path revealed itself to me. A councilor had suggested that I read a book on body language to better understand my peers. I read two and the legibility of the world dramatically increased. Not only did it help me understand this essential domain of human expression, it taught me how to express myself back in the “right” ways. Things improved a lot.

In this experience I detected an incredibly important pattern. I would not have used these words then, but what I realized was that books contained rules to games. Games that I needed to learn how to win. I developed a conviction that rules, lots and lots of rules, could lead me, finally, out of the cyclone.

Two things I appreciate about myself are my energy and ability to focus when motivated. Both of these capacities are large, and I attacked the problem of accumulating and conforming to rules with ferocity. Almost like I was trying to pay back life for all of the pain it had inflicted on me. I was also able to see school through this new lens - not as a place of learning, but as a structure of rules that I could get inside and manipulate to my ends. Once I viewed it that way, it was almost trivial. I went from barely passing to being a straight A student. I took up running and nutrition - games with relatively simple rules - and my physical health improved dramatically. Social rules were still challenging, but armed with ever expanding ideas about how to act towards people, I started to “win” social interactions. My transformation was, externally, almost total. People marveled at how I had changed.

Richard Feynman once said something like “the quality of an idea is determined by how much more you get out of it then you put into it.” It’s heady when you discover the vast open vistas of a new perspective. Most of what I’ve been describing so far makes it sound like I made deliberate choices here, but the reality was a lot of this was happening unconsciously. It’s only with hindsight that I can narrate my experience this way. That started to change in junior year, when I finally grokked science.

Science

It sounds so dumb, but one of the most consequential days of my life was in Junior year of high school. Our chemistry teacher was introducing us to the perfect gas equation and wrote it on the board.

PV = nRT

He then demonstrated how one could derive new truths about the world by combining mathematical expressions. My mind started to whirl. In The Lost Books of the Odyssey, Zachary Mason re-imagines Odysseus’ encounter with the sirens. He writes this astonishingly beautiful passage:

As their song crescendoed I had the sudden conviction that the world, which I had considered the province of meaningless chances, a mad dance of atoms, was as orderly as the hexagons in the honeycombs . . . that behind everything, from Helen’s weaving to Circe’s mountain to Scylla’s death, was a subtle pattern, an order of the most compelling lucidity, but hidden from me, a code I could never crack.

Something like that.

To this point, my thoughts about rules and games felt like a peculiar aspect of my experience, but in that class I realized it was an entire way of knowing. And, in time, I would come to believe it was the only way of knowing. It’s not an exaggeration to say I fell in love. Rules had helped me finally feel safe in the world. They guided my actions and that allowed me to live confidently and experience things I wanted. The idea that you could make everything that exists tractable through the generation and following of rules was mind blowing.

You might predict, given all the above, that when I went to college I would select a science or art that was strictly aligned with my rule-obsession. It would have been consistent for me to select math, or physics, or computer science, or an engineering discipline. Instead, I selected biochemistry - a science notorious for the weakness of its models, where almost everything is understood through experiment, where the complexity of systems are intricate to the point of paradox.

Throughout college, I devoted myself to acquiring what C.P. Snow called:

The scientific edifice of the physical world [that is] in its intellectual depth, complexity and articulation, the most beautiful and wonderful collective work of the mind of man.

I reveled in this gigantic intellectual playground, delighting in the power of Newton’s equations of motion, the arcane hieroglyphics of organic chemistry, the delicate nuances of ecology and evolution. I read widely in the social sciences. I was a glutton at the trough.

Profession

I’ve already written about my strange decision at the end of my college career to go to work in construction. At that time it felt to me like a very natural extension of my worldview. In college I had consumed the major works of Ayn Rand and absorbed the heroism of her characters if not her rationalist philosophy. Part of me wanted to be a hero too, especially given the state of Louisiana at that time.

Like my selection of biochemistry, this is another place where the rumblings of inconsistency murmur. On the surface, one would expect that construction would be a cathedral of rules. Concrete and steel, blueprints and contracts - all spaces where rigid rules seemingly apply. But, I can tell you with joy that following all of the rules in construction will lead to certain failure. Construction is much like war in one sense. The value of a plan is in having planned, but - once you’re in it - all of your success depends on improvising.

This feature of Construction shows up in a number of ways. It is one of the few industries in the United States where convicted felons can reliably get work. It is also a place where competence is not possible to fake. These two facts are not unrelated. Building is in constant and intimate contact with the physical world. Because of that, it is fundamentally authentic. The people who chose it reflect that. You don’t pick someone for your crew because you like them, you pick them because they are good.

Here again, you might predict that my rule-obsession would be misaligned to the needs of my job. It was exactly the opposite. I fucking loved it. I love the acrid smell of recently welded metal, the damp cold of Louisiana mornings, the dirt and grime under my fingernails, the calluses and sores, the creativity called out of me by the constraints of hard deadlines and material logistics. More than anything though I loved the people, the way they told stories, the way they laughed and fought, the way they walked in the world - as if they owned the place they stood.

Passing back and forth between construction and college let me put the two contexts into contrast. I felt my voracious curiosity satisfied in class, but on the jobsite I felt free.

My last project in construction was managing a significant portion of building a hospital in New Orleans. At the end of it, I hit a crossroads. I could take the path that opened to me in the trades, one that could have cracked open my worldview. Or I could return to the safety of the rules. In the end, I decided to go to MIT. That was the safe decision. I’m pretty sure it was a good one. But, one can never know these things for sure.

MIT

From my perspective, extremely prestigious business schools are like factories for equipping students with rules to play a very specific type of game. You might guess this game is about how to run a business effectively. While that might be a downstream consequence of attending, I would not say the institutions are geared to that outcome. Instead, they’re tooled to produce players of high-stakes status games.

The ability to play these games competently is a baseline requirement to even gain acceptance. Transcripts, essays, interviews, each one of these tests your status and your ability to achieve status. One can make all types of arguments about how these things test for competence too. This point seems obvious to me. I also know many of my fellow alumni, current students, and people in the business school industry would disagree with me. That’s all fine. Sometimes I disagree with me too. Everyone is welcome to their own perspectives. This is just one of mine.

To me, there is a perfect description of what business schools do in a passage from the novel Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. The plot is about a group of veterans returned home from the Iraqi war to be feted in an increasingly absurd series of events celebrating them in Dallas, Texas. Billy at one point, marvelling at the worldliness of a Hollywood agent who is accompanying his crew, thinks to himself:

Life in the Army has been a crash course in the scale of the world, which is such that he finds himself in a constant state of wonder as to how things come to be. Stadiums, for example. Airports. The interstate highway system. Wars. He wants to know how is it paid for, where do the billions come from? He imagines a shadowy, math-based parallel world that exists not just beside but amid the physical world, a transparent interlay of Matrix-style numbers through which flesh-and-blood humans move like fish through kelp. This is where the money lives, an integer-based realm of code and logic, geometric modules of cause and effect. The realm of markets, contracts, transactions, elegant vectors of fiber-optic agency whereby mind-boggling sums of mysterious wealth shoot around the world on beams of light. It seems the airiest thing there is and yet the realest, but how you enter that world he has no idea . . .

One reliable route is elite business school education.

The rules of this game are subtle, but there are some general things to say about them. Partially it’s about making yourself easily legible to other people. A key skill to learn is how to explain yourself as simply and relevantly as possible. Conformance to someone’s preconceived notions of what you are is a reliable strategy here. It also teaches you how to hold conversations with people that are fun or practical, but not vulnerable. You can have vulnerable conversations in business school, but that’s not what the institution is teaching you. It also teaches an elaborate way of articulating perspectives such that they seem completely “objective”. Even though any working scientist would tell you that data always carries meaning in a particular model of the world. A particular set of assumptions. This fetishization of “objective” decision making is ever present in the argot of MBA alumni and students. Again, speaking from my frame.

I say all of this because I believe there is an effect of the intention of the institution. This effect shows up in shifting students’ objectives to be more directly aligned with winning status games. Or, to put it the other way, students see the results of playing these games well and shift their objectives because they want those outcomes too. The effect is so pervasive that it’s hard to even detect. When I entered MIT, I was excited at the infinite possibilities that would be available to me after school. I could have actualized that, but by the end I was only entertaining three offers - a private equity position, and two major corporations. These seemed like the only possible choices for me. No one told me I couldn’t do something else, I told myself that.

I picked a corporate job and launched into that life. I knew, even then, I was misaligned. In my experience suffering is almost always a precondition for growth. I’m not sure we can change how much we suffer on our way to growth. What I do know is that for the next five years I suffered a great deal. That suffering spanned my work, my romantic relationships, and my experiences. That suffering arose from trying to win a status game that, before I entered MIT, I was only dimly aware of.

From my frame - science, technology, rationality, rules - whatever word you want to give it - has a dual feature - it embraces, but it also grasps. I had come to feel safe in its embrace. The rules had given me so much - “success”, competency, a rich intellectual interior. But, by allowing the rules to substitute for my attention, I had missed how they grasped me. Rules are not just about discipline that flows to sustained action. They can also be filters that prevent your interior life from escaping into your awareness. They become dangerous as soon as you stop interrogating them. A rule permits you to say convincingly “I’m not allowed to feel that or do that”. They embrace, but they also grasp. They are never free.

Covid

I don’t think it adds much to the story to catalogue in detail the suffering I experienced between graduating from MIT in 2016 and my life disintegrating in 2021. But a few words may be helpful. I mostly hated my jobs. Working within big institutions (where rules are very important) is disagreeable to my competencies and my way. I shared a deeply unhealthy romantic relationship with a kind and wonderful woman. Inside, I felt lost in a maze where the walls were slowly getting more and more narrow.

My response to this was more rules. I started going to therapy because that’s how you deal with sadness. I started to read new books, each one holding the promise of an idea that might help me escape or be happy. I look back on myself at that time and feel so much empathy for what he was going through. The feelings of inadequacy, inferiority, and “wrongness” were pervasive and becoming more frequent. Feeling like something was wrong with me for not being able to succeed in my job, for not being able to get married to my girlfriend. Constantly and earnestly working to try to patch my deficits with new rules, while resentment built to the rules themselves. This paradoxical cycle drove me deeper and deeper into agony.

There’s an idea from statistical modeling that is so elegantly applicable here. When statisticians are building models, they sometimes make the mistake of overfitting. They select too many rules that the model needs to satisfy based on the available data. In some real sense, the model “believes” that the situation is more complicated than it actually is. In that belief, its behavior wildly oscillates as it tries to satisfy all of the constraints at once.

I imagine, if models could introspect, they would feel the way I felt during this time. Moving from one thing to another, not really understanding my behavior or my motivations, and knowing that much of the motion was wasted, but not knowing why. The scariest thing was I would take actions and reflect on them and not be able to understand why. Sometimes not even asking the question. In my lucid moments, I felt like I was descending into insanity.

Covid accelerated my fall. At home, not buffered by the winds of contact with others and the world, I fully encountered myself. I found myself in front of my bathroom mirror several times a day staring at my face and asking, out loud, “who are you Jake?” Then I would go back to what I was doing and ignore that I had just done that. I was tired all the time and would take naps in the middle of the day, and wake up with the total looming certainty of death. I concealed these things from everyone in my life, including my therapist. One of my rules was - people who are normal do not experience things like this. Another was that it was a matter of survival for me to be normal.

Station Eleven is a beautiful novel. I’m very happy I read it at some point, because a line from it constantly repeated itself to me during this time: “It is sometimes necessary to break everything”. At the end of 2021, as soon as things opened up, I started to break things.

The first thing I did was quit with no backup and no idea what I was going to do. The second thing I did was move out of Los Angeles. I told my girlfriend we were on the verge of a breakup and she quit her job to move with me. I didn’t know where we were going, but I knew I needed to go. We bounced around for a few months and in the last gasps of our relationship, she took a traveling nursing job in Honolulu and we came out here for a month.

At this point, I had a light relationship with jiujitsu and a vague sense that it was somehow important to me. At the very least, I knew I wanted to train regularly while in Honolulu. On Reddit I learned about a gym called Workshop that apparently had a nogi “wizard” who taught there. The style was described as “wicked good, wicked weird²”

I emailed. Asked if I could come in. Got an affirmative.

Workshop was hard to find. It didn’t have a sign. It did nothing to announce itself. It was tucked away on the second floor of a small building, like it was hiding. The schedule on the website was wrong and I was ridiculously early for class. I waited on the mats with the lights off and sun steaming into the room through the windows. The space was comically small for a jiujitsu gym. It felt quiet. Calm. Empty.

An hour later, a tall man walked in. His presence was immediate. All of him was there. He shook my hand and introduced himself, “Hi, I’m Larry.”

1. It’s worth saying that my parents are both incredibly loving and diligent people who did everything they could to help me through this very challenging time in my life. They took me to the doctors, put me in therapy, helped me get medicated. I had the best care that two middle-class divorcees could access and then some.

2. Whoever you are u/Philip_T_McNasty - thank you. You did me a real solid.