This is the second version of the summary. The first version (1.0) can be found here. This second version updates how the the Tribe and the School are framed within the Project, a change in our structural organization, the implementation of the club model (officers, meetings, committees, etc.), and a few other details.
This post outlines the plan, structure, and elements of our jiu jitsu and mma social club, which we refer to as "The Tribe." This plan is currently in development. As such, every aspect of this post may change in future versions.
We're a jiu jitsu club made up of diverse but open-minded, adventurous people who are united by three motives: our desire for personal self-improvement, desire to help each other be safe and secure, and our desire to have fun with good friends.
- Personal self-improvement is accomplished by empowering each other to become the best version of ourselves possible.
- Safety and security is accomplished through assisting each other in times of need, making each other more physically, mentally, and emotionally resilient, and helping each other prepare for bad situations.
- Finally, we have fun by treating training like play, holding frequent social events, and going on cool, exciting adventures together.
So that's the tentative elevator pitch. The club is what we refer to as the "Tribe." We're like a motorcycle club, but instead of riding bikes, we train jiu jitsu (and mma.) From this point on, I'll use "Tribe" and "Club" interchangeably. Aside from the tribal organizational aspect, the Tribe also runs a School (tentatively called "Outlaws University") that operates as a private, for-profit business that operates the gym where we train and offers classes in three major domains:
1. Health and fitness (including martial arts)
2. Primitive skills (survival and "frontier" skills)
3. Personal self-improvement
The profits from the school fund the physical space utilized by the Tribe for training and social interactions (kinda like our clubhouse), provide funding for the Tribe's adventures, and provide some income for the Founding Members of the Tribe. Tribe members basically get the benefits of belonging to a "family" of good, fun people that will meet a whole bunch of their needs (think Maslow's hierarchy.)
Guiding Principles
The Club's guiding principles include:
- Teach what you know, learn what you need. We take a collaborative approach to martial arts training where our members’ expertise and past experience is highly valued.
- Training is a fun, socially-immersive event. We take our arts much more seriously than we take ourselves. We fully embrace the psychological value of laughter and play.
- Self-improvement and resiliency. We make each other better, tougher people.
- Competition and cooperation go hand in hand. Iron sharpens iron. The harder we push each other, the better the training partners we create, the better we get ourselves.
- Community matters. We value our club, the friends of the club, and our wider community in the Montrose area. We want to foster a community with good jobs, strong families, safe neighborhoods, and a vibrant culture.
The Current Lay of the Land
Currently, we have a 3,000 square foot jiu jitsu and mma gym (El Diablo Combatives) in Montrose, Colorado,
which has been operated by Shelly and I for about 16 months. Montrose
has about 20,000 residents in the town and another 15-20,000 in the
surrounding county. We're located about half way between Denver and Salt
Lake City, an hour south of Grand Junction, Colorado, and about 45
miles north of the San Juan Mountains.
We
operate the gym with a fairly standard martial arts school model where
we offer yearly, six month, and monthly memberships for individuals or
families (parents and their minor children.) We also sell ten class
punch cards.
We have six coaches, but we embrace a "share what you know"
collaborative model that encourages everyone taking on teaching and
mentoring roles. We have about twenty-five students, most of
which have been with us since the beginning. Our student numbers are
slowly ticking up, but COVID is still suppressing our numbers. Part of
the rationale behind this project is to dramatically expand our student
base by offering a wide variety of classes, workshops, and seminars.
Based on market research, we have just under 1,000 potential students in our area.
Financially,
the gym has not been profitable since we shut down for three months
last winter/ spring due to the pandemic. We're getting closer to the
black, though. Aside from COVID, we were also negatively affected by our
last two buildings being sold, which forced us to move twice in three
months.
We have two other jiu jitsu gyms in our town. While it
reduces our student base, it gives our community several options as
each gym has a distinct culture.
Who is Involved
Currently,
our team consists of myself, Shelly, Brandy and Brandon Dalton, and Heather Keppen, which we
designate as the "Founding Members." Prior
to bringing the other three folks on board, I had mostly done the
planning and testing of ideas on my own, though I regularly solicited
advice and ran ideas by two of our coaches and a few other members.
The
new additions to the planning team has been a hugely important
development as it's brought a lot of really good ideas to the table.
Importantly, this has allowed me to solve some problems without having
to run experiments, which is incredibly time-consuming.
We
may add
more people to the planning team, but because the Founding Team is also
the beginning of the "Tribe" (discussed below), we carefully vet who we
involve. The vetting process will consist of a "Prospect" phase and an "Apprentice" phase, which is intended to fully vet new members. The qualities we're looking for are based on the "Humble, Hungry, and People Smart" model explained
in the book "
The Ideal Team Player", a complimentary skill set and personality type (as measured with the Myers-Briggs-inspired test at
16personalities.com,
and most importantly, trustworthy people who express an interest in socializing
with each other. After all, we'll be spending a lot of time together. I
discuss this in more detail below.
The Organizational Model
Our organizational model starts with the "Tribe" we're naming "El Diablo Tribe" (members referred to as "The Diablos"), which is a social club organized around our shared love of the combat sports in general and jiu jitsu and mma in particular. The Club is governed by a constitution and bylaws, which are currently in draft form. The Club is run by a Council made up of elected officers. Our current Officers include The Chief (president), General Manager (vice president), Secretary, Treasurer, Social Liaison, and Competition Director.
The Club maintains the School, which serves multiple purposes.
First, it allows the Club members to share knowledge and skills with each other, which helps each member improve as a person.
Second, by offering lasses to non-members, we generate revenue for the Club.
Third, this allows the Club to maintain a physical space for training and socializing (a clubhouse, of sorts.) The School offers classes in three subject areas:
- Health and Fitness. This includes all combat sports and programs related to strength, conditioning, flexibility, and nutrition.
- Primitive Skills. This includes "pioneer skills", survival skills, and other practical hands-on life skills.
- Self-Improvement. This includes anything not covered in the other two subject areas that make us the best version of ourselves possible.
Details of the Tribe
In the most simple terms, the 'Tribe" is just a collection of people
who like each other enough to spend time doing stuff together, and organized as a Club.
The
purpose of the Tribe is to provide for the five different things humans
need to maximize our potential (yay Maslow!)
Based on what we've discovered from fMRI brain data, we're pretty sure
'tribalism" is hard-wired in our brains. It's what allowed our ancestors
to survive as cooperative social units. As I discussed in my Tribal Hypothesis post,
forming the right kind of Tribe with the right kind of members can
solve a whole slew of problems we face as individuals, as communities,
and as a nation. In short, forming tribes is probably the answer
to solving the bitter divisiveness that occurs as a function of the
relative safety, comfort, and technological advancement of modern
society.
I've spent A LOT of time studying the history,
psychology, and sociology of tribalism, and I've spent even more time
observing different types of "tribes" and how they affect the members
and their wider communities. I've also spent a lot of time observing
people who do not have tribes. Without reservation, I can confidently
say almost all humans absolutely NEED a tribe. The problem with our
modern world is a great deal of the options we have for tribes are
piss-poor. Many are simply poorly-disguised marketing plays (think
"people with Apple stickers on the back of their car), quite a few are
toxic (#MAGA and Amway), and a few are cults (Jonestown and Heaven's
Gate.) Some are generally good, like most church congregations,
fraternal organizations, or intentional communities and communes, but
they're inherently ideologically exclusive. As I explain in the Tribal
Hypothesis post linked above, that seriously limits their ability to
survive and thrive, or even provide what is necessary to address all
five of Maslow's fundamental human needs.
The other major
problem with most of our tribal options in the modern world is
leadership that ranges from mediocre to god-awful. Good leaders require a
host of skills, which Jocko Willinck addresses in his excellent book "Extreme Ownership."
But one skill in particular is absolutely essential to lead a tribe -
the ability to really empathize with each and every member of the tribe.
If an effective tribe has the required ideological diversity, the
leadership must understand everyone. The reason is simple - every
decision made has to be both good for the tribe and good for every
member. If that's impossible and a decision negatively affects the tribe
in general or an individual member in particular, the leadership needs
to be able to a) actually make that hard decision with compassion and
kindness, and b) explain the rationale behind the decision to the member
or members who are negatively affected in a way that doesn't destroy
tribal harmony. This is no easy task, and really good leaders also need
to be willing and able to enlist as much help as they need. For our
ancestors, good leaders were apparent as they matured from childhood to
adulthood. For us, identifying good leaders is a far more difficult
task.
Taking all this into consideration, how do we build THIS
tribe? As it turns out, a Brazilian jiu jitsu gym is a wonderful social
filter. For our tribe, we're looking for a few very specific
characteristics:
- We need people who have a sense of humor, prioritize having fun, and aren't overly prudish,
hence our gym's name and goofy chicken logo (if people know the joke,
they're always "our people") and the URL of this blog. This means we
need to avoid the overly politically-correct and the people who don't
laugh at dick jokes.
- We need people free of serious mental illness, drama queens, or prima donas. All people create problems; that's the nature of social interactions. But some people cause GOOD problems, like "I should clean the house, but I really want to go watch the UFC fights with the Tribe!". Other people cause BAD problems, like intentionally stirring up drama because daddy didn't love them enough.
- We need people who are open-minded
enough to accept ideological differences. While we can improve
acceptance over time, people who have an emotional attachment to extreme
ideologies, which includes belief in conspiracy theories, is a
non-starter. It helps that I personally tend to identify and scare off
bigots and overly judgmental people pretty quickly.
- We need people who genuinely enjoy socializing with the existing group beyond just practicing jiu jitsu.
- We need people who are genuinely kind and selfless. Selfishness and tribal harmony are incongruent.
- We need people who are humble. Ego always leads to toxicity.
- We need people who are people-smart.
They need to be able to read the room and absolutely cannot have
grating personalities. Sometimes we call this "emotional intelligence."
- We need people who are hungry.
Specifically, they need to understand that the benefits they receive
from tribalism is directly tied to their personal contributions to the
tribe. The more you put in, the more you get out. And the better the
tribe gets. With the right tribe and the right matching of skills,
personality, and roles within the tribe, contributing to the tribe and
receiving recognition from the tribe is incredibly
intrinsically-motivating.
- We need people who bring tangible skills, knowledge, or complimentary personality traits that will help the tribe in some positive way, and be willing to contribute to the welfare and improvement of the Tribe. Tribes absolutely cannot have dead weight. Freeloaders who are capable-but-unwilling to contribute cannot be part of the Tribe.
Each
and every one of these traits can be discovered after training with
someone on the mats for a few months, usually far less. In general,
people can be good training partners, but may not necessarily be good
tribe candidates. As such, our vetting process will end up being rather
extensive. It's important to note not all students in jiu jitsu classes
are Tribe members; jiu jitsu is merely the shared interest that unites the Club.
If you're
reading this with the goal of maybe starting your own tribe, note these
are the traits WE look for. Shelly and I have spent a long time meeting a
lot of different kinds of people. It also helped that Garrick, the guy
who started the gym before we bought it, had already started recruiting a
lot of people that had those very characteristics. We're intimately
familiar with the kinds of people we love spending time with and what
kinds of people we need to avoid. The exhaustive list is a function of
experience and really knowing who we are and what we value. Your mileage may vary.
So what purpose does the Tribe serve? Beyond the meeting of human needs, the Tribe serves three basic functions - mutual aid, protection, and socialization.
We help each other when help is needed, we protect each other when we
face any kind of threat, and we have fun together. These three
dimensions cover a lot of territory, so I won't go into the
intricate details here. But generally, in good times, the Tribe helps
each other navigate the little shit, often logistical in nature, that
pops up. Like maybe picking up another Tribe members' kids from school
because they had a minor emergency, or dog-sitting while another Tribe
member goes on vacation. Fixing a leaky faucet. Giving advice on how to
cook macaroni. Stuff like that.
And of course, socializing.
We're building the Tribe with the kind of people we want to be friends
with,which creates a really cool, fun group. Making friends in the
modern world, once you leave school anyway, is one of the more difficult
aspects of adulthood I would not have anticipated. While we train with
each other a lot, we've found adding in social events gives our
group the opportunity to really get to know each other, which is a
tremendous tool for developing new, lasting friendships. This is especially helpful for spouses and significant others who may not train.
In
the bad times (think "complete breakdown of the social contract"), the
Tribe functions more like the tribes that allowed our ancestors to
survive. As I mentioned above, the reality of what this would look like
is likely wayyyy different than what most prepper-minded people imagine.
We're not likely going to have a scenario where we're holed up in a
fortified bunker we have to defend against roving bands of marauders.
While there is always an aspect of protecting your resources against bad
people, the reality is the vast majority of society would organize in
their own tribes, and those tribes will mostly work cooperatively. There
would be occasional bad people and there would be some bad tribes. But
humans under stress don't turn on each other en mass for the same reason
animals rarely if ever kill their own species - self-preservation is
baked into our DNA. We wouldn't be here if our survival instinct led the
majority of us to be ruthless killers.
Having said that, the
organization of the Tribe does factor in the aspect of power. If the
shit hit the fan, it would be better to be the most powerful tribe
instead of the weakest tribe. Given the "power" of a Tribe increases as a
function of the individual members' ability to work cohesively in
specialized tasks, the tribe that has the most practice at this will be
the most powerful. Further, if that tribe is benevolent and already has a
great working relationship with the surrounding community, that tribe
has an awesome capacity to lead the entire community in a way that would
maximize survival. Thrive, even. Further, any community that consists
of a collection of united tribes would be an incredibly powerful check
on dangerous, malevolent tribes or individuals. That's kinda the
meta-strategy of the development of this Tribe.
The Details of the School
We chose a School as the cornerstone of the Project because knowledge
is a flexible, versatile, valuable commodity that has infinite
scalability and many opportunities to develop passive income steams. It
can provide immediate, tangible, inexhaustible value to the Tribe and
the wider community, will bring people together from diverse
backgrounds, and can be used as a tool to unify people socially. Given
the present state of the country, this is something we desperately need.
Finally, s long-time professional educators and coaches, this is an industry we know inside and out.
The School
will differ from other "schools" in that the primary focus will be on
practical skills more than academic skills, though we'll likely develop
some geeky stuff, too. The practical skills will cover life skills that
are useful to survive and thrive in the modern world, and may cover
anything from how to create a resume to how to do basic car maintenance.
Part of the motivation for this stems from my experiences as a public
school teacher. As we've increased our academic focus, more practical
skills have fallen by the wayside. We will fill that "Why didn't they teach me that in school?!?" void.
Aside
from modern skills, we will also teach more primitive skills that our
society is quickly losing, such as food preservation, raising animals,
gardening, and so on. Part of the motivation stems from a genuine desire
to preserve the work of those who came before us, and part of the
motivation stems from a desire to make our community in general and
Tribe in particular more resilient. We're engaging in disaster
preparedness, but doing so in a way that addresses the most likely
reality. If we study the history and psychology of social collapse,
circumstances rarely if ever play out like a typical "prepper" believes.
If the shit really does hit the fan, our world will look less like "Mad
Max" and more like "Little House on the Prairie."
The School
will also be an extension of the jiu jitsu and mma gym we're currently
operating. Given combat sports are THE common thread for the Club, this is an integral part of the entire Project. We'll expand the classes offered in the beginning to include a
few classes that will be taught by members of the Tribe. Currently, we offer adult Brazilian jiu jitsu and MMA classes, and a youth jiu jitsu class. In the near future we'll be adding a striking class, a competition class, a "yoga for jiu jitsu" class, and a women's boxing class.
In addition, we all have
expertise in specific subjects outside the martial arts paradigm, so
these will be the classes we offer initially to test things like
scheduling, duration, payment plans, different ways to utilize our
physical space, etc. The school will use a variety of different
educational models ranging from universities to public schools to
homeschooling. The ideas borrow heavily from community life enrichment
schools and the free school movement.
The school will be the
primary revenue stream for the project, which will pay the bills, fund
future expansion, and possibly provide an income stream to the Tribe Members.
Will will probably use the Profit First financial model for operations, which is a Dave Ramsey-esque accounting system.
Long-term,
the goal is to acquire land to develop the new aspects of the School
that we cannot do in our current downtown location. This land will also be used for the Tribe's recreational activities. Specifically, it
will allow us to teach a wider variety of primitive skills and develop
an infrastructure that will assist the Tribe in social bonding and
provide resources in difficult times.
Conclusion
As of this second version of the project summary, this is still a tentative plan that's currently in development. The collaboration with the Founding Members will likely tweak aspects
of the plan, or even change major elements. In the coming weeks, we'll
have A LOT of conversations about these topics. New perspectives will
give me new insight. New, better ideas will likely replace that which
I've planned. We have a group of smart people with a lot of different
areas of expertise working on this project, and we have even more smart
people in our Facebook Group who may have thoughts and ideas. If this
entire concept interests you and you'd like to be part of the
conservation, join the group!
~Jason
Relevant Links
These are the posts I've written explaining more aspects of this project in greater detail.
The Theory Behind the Project
Why I Think This Idea Can Fix the Bullshit Divisions and Craziness We See in America Today
Why We Need Tribes in Our Lives
How Tribes Can Make Your Life Better
The Process We Use to Find the Right People for the Tribe
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