Project Summary - The 30,000 Foot View - Version 3.0

 

This is the third version of the outline for this project. To see how these ideas have evolved as we've developed them, read the first version here and the second version here. 

The Big Idea

We're a collective of people, organized as a club, who care deeply about improving ourselves, our families, the members of our Tribe, and the members of our communities scattered throughout our Western Slope region. We affectionately refer to our club as "The Tribe." The Tribe is run by a Council of elected officials, and we've established several committees that are carrying out the various tasks related to the research and development of the project.

We achieve self-improvement through intentional actions that address the seven dimensions of wellness. Each member of the Tribe actively and continually grows in each of these dimensions, and actively and enthusiastically helps other members of the Tribe do the same. The dimensions are:

• Physical Wellness - Includes engaging in healthy behaviors like exercise, good nutrition, abstaining from harmful substances, identifying early signs of illness, and protecting yourself and those we love from injury and harm.
  
• Emotional Wellness - Includes developing the ability to feel and express the entire range of emotions in a healthy way, having the ability to love and be loved, and achieving a deep sense of purpose and fulfillment in life. This also includes developing optimism, self-esteem, self-acceptance, and an ability to share feelings.
  
• Intellectual Wellness - Includes engaging in creative, mentally-stimulating activities, especially creative problem-solving applied to ourselves, our Tribe, and our community. We want to expand our knowledge and improve our skills, which includes staying up-to-date on current events and how they affect us, and routinely seeking out activities that actively engage our mind.
  
• Social Wellness - Includes learning to interact with our families, our Tribe, our communities, and our world more effectively, and live up to the demands and expectations of our personal roles in each. We do this by learning better communication skills, developing intimacy with others, and creating a support network within our Tribe and our broader community.
  
• Spiritual Wellness - Involves seeking harmony between what lies within us and the outer world. We accomplish this by developing a set of guiding principles, beliefs, and values that give our life direction and meaning. We develop high levels of faith, hope, and commitment. We question everything and develop an appreciation for that which cannot be readily explained or understood.
  
• Environmental Wellness - Includes developing an awareness of our daily habits and how they impact our physical environment and developing a way of life that maximizes the harmony with the earth and minimizes harm to the environment. This also includes not just protecting our physical surroundings, but actively improving them as much as possible. .
  
• Occupational Wellness - Involves making use of our gifts, skills, talent, knowledge, and experiences to gain purpose, happiness, and enrichment in our lives. We want to integrate a commitment to our chosen occupation into a total lifestyle that is satisfying, rewarding, and helps others in a tangible way. 

Different members of the Tribe have special skills, knowledge, and experiences in each of these dimensions, which allow us to help members who may struggle in one or more of these dimensions. In this way, the Tribe is sort of like a jigsaw puzzle with each member playing a role to creating something bigger. This cooperative interdependence, coupled with our diverse Tribe, creates a powerful collection of symbiotic relationships that forms a virtuous cycle of positive self-improvement for our individual Tribe members and the Tribe as a whole.

 

I call this process "Holistic Lifestyle Design." Each one of us considers each of these seven dimensions, our goals, and our values. Then we figure out what we really want in life, and how that can be integrated into the Tribe to develop mutually-beneficial win-win relationships. Finally, we develop a personal roadmap to make that happen in a a way that integrates every aspect of our lives that really matter to us.  

 

The Tribe, in turn, helps provide the guidance and resources to make real, concrete changes to improve the lives of the Tribe Members in a way that aligns with the values, goals, families, and community. 

Outlaws University - Teaching Holistic Lifestyle Design

Our Tribe is the vehicle we use to improve the individual members of the Tribe. While this certainly makes an objectively measurable improvement in the lives of our Tribe Members, the effects on the rest of our community are only limited to the impact we can make through our own self-improvement. We can radically amplify the positive effects we can have on the world around us if we teach others how to improve themselves across the seven dimensions of wellness. 

Enter Outlaws University.

As the name implies, we're a school that breaks the rules of education. We care about affecting real, positive change in the world in general and the Montrose and surrounding communities in particular. As a lifelong public high school teacher, I've spent my entire adult life trying to solve the riddle of how to help each and every one of my students. The system itself, though, creates barrier after barrier, usually in the form of rules, policies, and procedures, that severely limit our ability to reach every student. These barriers are usually created by well-meaning people who simply cannot foresee the unintended consequences of their actions. 

Our school solves this problem by distilling education down to its most basic element - we have a teacher who possesses some useful skills or knowledge and has a desire to teach something, and we have individuals who have an intrinsic desire to learn those skills or knowledge. We bring them together and allow them to negotiate how that transfer of knowledge will happen. We will be there to offer suggestions and guidance based on our own expertise in the psychology of education and learning, but we are a resource. Nothing more, nothing less. 

The specific topics we'll teach could be anything covered under the umbrella of the seven dimensions of wellness, but we adhere to the "oxygen mask" principle. When you're on a airplane and the cabin depressurizes, you're instructed to put your own oxygen mask on before you help others put their oxygen mask on. In the same way, our teachers will be people who have successfully applied what they're teaching to their own lives before they teach it to their students. This prevents a strong personal pet peeve of mine where so-called "life coaches" take money from people to give them guidance about living a better life when their own lives are complete train wrecks.

In future posts, I will spell out exactly how this will work in a practical sense.

The Current Lay of the Land

The State of the Tribe

Currently, our Tribe and the Outlaws University are in the development phase. Our Tribe has five Founding Members, one additional Tribe Member, and around four other people who are considering becoming Members. Given we're still developing these ideas, we're not actively recruiting new members. Too many chefs in the kitchen and what not.

Our Tribe members have a few extremely diverse shared interests, and we're currently weighing how to incorporate those interests into the project. The most notable shared interests include:

• Regenerative agriculture and accompanying animal care
  
• Brazilian jiu jitu
• Boxing and kickboxing
  
• Mixed martial arts
• Yoga
  
• Healthy nutrition
• Developing social connections
• Prepping
• Teaching and learning primitive skills
• Helping kids and adults navigate the negative effects of the COVID pandemic
• Firearms and other self-defense training
• Off-grid living
• Personal self-improvement
  

This isn't a comprehensive list, but these are a few of the major topics we discuss, do, or are in various stages of implementing. Each item on this list satisfies one or more of the seven dimensions of wellness, and we either teach them now to people outside our Tribe, or likely will be teaching them in the relative near future. 

Our Surrounding Community

Making a positive impact on our community is a major goal of this project, so it will be helpful for readers to understand some of the features and problems that define our community. We define our "community" as the valley communities of Montrose, Olathe, Ridgway, Delta, Cederedge, Hotchkiss, Paonia, and surrounding areas loosely bordered by the Grand Mesa to the north, Black Canyon to the east, Uncompahgre Plateau to the west. and the San Juan mountains to the South. The area includes approximately 65,000-75,000 residents. 

Our interest in regenerative agriculture stems from the historical agriculture industry in the area. Outside of the aforementioned small towns, ranches and farms define the valley landscape. Western Colorado is in a bit of a pickle in regards to agriculture. For 140 years, irrigated agriculture has defined the area. But the rising temperatures of climate change, coupled with drought conditions seen only once before in the last 1,800 years, are slowly killing agriculture in the region. Simply put, there's not enough snow falling in the mountains, too much is evaporating as the snow runoff melts and fills reservoirs, and too much water is being diverted for use on Colorado's Front Range and the America Southwest. This article explains the problem in detail. 

The life of the typical rancher and farmer in the region has always been difficult, but it becomes increasingly difficult with each passing year. Not only is the water slowly disappearing, but the political winds of the state are shifting due to a population explosion on the urbanized Front Range corridor. As the population of the state becomes more urbanized, more and more laws and policies are being developed and passed that actively harm our rural farming communities. Like the reintroduction of gray wolves. Or the dumbass ballot initiative 16. Hopelessness, depression, and despair are rampant; far too many people are living exceptionally unhealthy lifestyles as a means to cope as their lifestyle slowly slips away.

These problems are exasperated by a growing trend where ranchers, due to impossible economic situations and no hope for the future, sell their land to developers and sell the water rights to various municipalities. This trend is creating a patchwork of developments being built in and around existing ranches. Given Western Colorado is a popular place to relocate, there's plenty of demand for houses in these new developments. City folk in Denver and the uber-expensive West Coast are searching for a quieter, slower, more affordable lifestyle, and the ample outdoor activities in the region prove to be a powerful draw. Indeed, the City of Montrose has been recreating itself into a regional outdoor recreation hub for a number of years.

Regenerative agriculture practices may or may not be able to save the area, but maintaining the status quo will result in a predictable, painful, tragic end to agriculture in the region. But more is needed than just altering the land management practices. The people themselves need support. This is where the Tribe and Outlaws University come in - modeling and teaching the seven dimensions of wellness with the goal of helping to make our neighbors healthier, happier, and better able to cope with the stressors of our rapidly-changing region. 

Our Tribe and the University can also play a role in helping smooth the relationship between the people who have lived here for generations and the flood of outsiders moving from cities. Rural America is a different world. I know; I grew up in the sticks of Northern Michigan. There's an entirely different culture with different norms and different ways of relating to each other, all born out of necessity. Many of the topics we would teach at the University, such as agricultural and animal-based skills or primitive skills, would be geared towards complete novices. Learning these skills would help urban and suburban dwellers understand and empathize with rural living, and help them gain an appreciation for the hard work that provides the food they buy from the grocery store.

Likewise, we can also play a role in helping the agricultural community see the influx of new people as a resource, not an intrusion. Regenerative agriculture practices requires significantly more advanced planning, as does advanced water management strategies. The influx of people usually brings some significant skilled labor, which will help integrate technological advancements in current and future agricultural practices. 

Or maybe we'll see a significant shift away from large-scale agricultural operations, and see a proliferation of small "hobby farms" popping up. In this case, our Tribe and the University would be well-positioned to help teach the basic skills required to run said hobby farms in a sustainable, responsible way.

Or perhaps the confluence of conditions proves to be too great to overcome and the entire irrigated agriculture industry in the region dies. While this would be our worst-case scenario, the Tribe and University would be an excellent resource to help people transition to other endeavors that would fulfill each of the seven dimensions of wellness. And, given the nature of the University structure, we could adapt whatever we teach to any sort of regional demographic shift. If the region does become an outdoor recreation mecca, we have the ability and infrastructure to teach any outdoor recreational skill. 

Conclusion

 

This is a far-ranging, ambitious project born out of a genuine desire to make our world a better place by a small group of talented, driven people. We believe, with the right structures and practices, that we can make a significant, positive difference in our lives, our families, in our Tribe, and in our community. 

The project is still in its infancy, but our goals and strategies get more focused and detailed as the project planning evolves. We have the structure of our Tribe established and have started interacting as a social group, and we're creating the structure of the University. Within a few months, we should have a bare-bones version of the University up and running.

This likely won't be the final version of the project, but it's getting relatively close. Stay tuned for more info, and check out some of the older posts on this blog to get a feel for some of the ideas and principles that are driving our vision. 

~ Jason

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Project Summary: The 30,000 Foot View 2.1

 

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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The Vision for the School: The Microscopic View 1.0

 

Purpose of the Post

This post is the first public explanation of the details of the School aspect of this project in its completed form. This will be the end goal, not our starting point. This is essentially the first draft of the plan, which will be changed as our ideas evolve with collaborative planning and goal setting with the Tribe and others, such as in our Facebook Group. This is only the first step post-brainstorming, so it is pretty rough around the edges. The goal in releasing it now it to get critical feedback on the basic ideas at the BEGINNING of planning versus the END of planning. It's just a more efficient way to collaborate. 

The plan, as it is in this form, has quite a few complex parts. Future versions need to be refined, clarified, and simplified. 

The Vision and Plan

Mission Statement and Rationale - What is the ultimate goal, and why?

Our mission statement is as follows:

The Lab Project improves our local community by creating a hub of skills, knowledge, and wisdom that unifies diverse members of our community to solve tricky problems within our community.

Our ultimate goal with this project is to improve our local community by creating a centralized hub of skills, knowledge, and wisdom that unifies diverse members of our community to solve tricky problems. This is accomplished by creating a non-compulsory, non-accredited school offering life-enrichment classes to members of our community. Out Tribe runs the school, our Faculty teach classes and lead collaborative community-improvement projects, and our Students learn and assist the faculty in completing their projects.

The summary of the project can be found here: Project Summary: The 30,000 Foot View (v.1.0)

The hypothesis that creates the foundation of the project can be found here: The Sociopolitical Tribal Hypothesis: The Foundation of the Project

As is explained in the "hypothesis" post, this project requires ideologically-diverse people to work together to solve real problems affecting our local community. In the simplest terms, this means sociopolitically-diverse people - liberals, conservatives, and everyone in between.

Our school is not a replacement for formal K-12 or higher education. It is meant to be a supplement. 

Vision and Rationale - What is the school going to look like, and why?

Our School will be organized using a model similar to a university (with an administration, faculty, and students who teach, learn, and work on solving local problems around our community here in Montrose.) The school will use basic psychological principles to motivate these people to collaborate and innovate using a project-based learning framework. 

How We Use Motivation

Per Abraham Maslow, humans have five basic needs. We utilize those five needs to create an environment where participants are intrinsically motivated to make a real difference through improving themselves and their community. Human curiosity and a genuine desire to help others are the engines that drive this project.

The Tribe and Faculty are assessed for their personalities, strengths, passions, skills, and knowledge to place them in a role within the school structure that allows them to reach their full potential in a deeply-fulfilling way. They identify what they want to get out of life, and we help them achieve it while giving back something of value to the Tribe and to our community. In this sense, we create win-win relationships. 

What Do We Teach and Why Do We Teach It?

The classes our School teaches are life enrichment classes, where "life enrichment" includes any topic or subject matter that improves our students' lives in a measurable way. This can range from Brazilian jiu jitsu to knife-sharpening to writing a resume. Any and all topics may be taught depending on the the expertise of our Faculty and the needs of our Students.

The School also provides all the tools necessary, and removes as many barriers as possible, to use what we teach to create a safe, healthy, unified, resilient community.

Our school's pedagogy (how we teach) is heavily inspired by the Unschooling movement, benign neglect parenting, homeschooling, the apprenticeship model, and my own "Organic Learning" experiential learning idea.

How do We Share Ideas?

Our school adheres to the principle of open knowledge, which is based on the open source software movement. As much as possible, we make teaching and learning free and open to anyone and everyone. The free sharing of ideas allows others to adopt ideas, experiment , and improve them. To accomplish this, we will use various Web-based technologies, such as this blog, a podcast, social media, our website, and video hosting sites such as Youtube.

How do we build a sustainable and resilient Tribe, School, and Community?

One of our goals is to assure our Tribe, School, and Community can weather any storm we may encounter to guarantee our long-term success. To this end, our first S&R (sustainability and resiliency) goal is to make the Tribe sustainable for one year with no external support. Our second S&R goal is to do the same for the School (Faculty and Students.) Our third S&R goal is to do the same for our Community. For these goals, "sustainable" means "meeting all five levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs for all members of these three groups. 

We will also accomplish this by creating and projecting a culture of kindness, empathy, and compassion backed by a rock-solid culture of strength, courage, honor, and mastery. We will use our martial arts program to instill this culture across all aspects of our Tribe and our School. 

How will we unite our Tribe, School, and Community to assure different people are all working towards the same mutually-beneficial goals?

To accomplish this, we will actively teach leadership skills to our Tribe, then our Faculty, and finally our Students. The idea is to create as many high quality, capable leaders as possible to improve the pool of leaders for each of these three groups. Better leadership makes for better outcomes for everyone.

We will also do what we can to assure our school includes Tribe and Faculty that are an accurate representation of our community. This will help these groups understand and empathize with anyone and everyone in the greater Montrose area, which will make the school's project-based learning methods more effective. 

Finally, we will utilize cooperative interdependence (the Jigsaw Classroom model) and Organic Learning as much as possible. These systems, when working in conjunction, allows different people to use their different knowledge, skills, and experiences cooperatively to solve real problems in our community.

Guiding Principles - What are they and why do we have these specific principles?

Our Tribe and our School are run based on a set of principles that affect every decision we make. This method of operation assures we stay true to our mission statement. 

Principle #1: The best way to solve problems is to give diverse, motivated people tricky, relevant problems to solve, a barrier-free environment, and an easy way to communicate. 

Principle #2: Holistic goal-setting is used for every level of planning for the Tribe and the School. Within the school, holistic goal-setting is used for department planning, class planning, pedagological experimentation, and projects. 

Principle #3: We embrace open knowledge. Everyone should have free, open access to the information we produce for the purposes of improving themselves and those around them.

Principle #4: We embrace the Gift Economy, which is the idea that freely giving with kindness and altruism improves the lives of everyone. Capitalistic Altruism. 

Principle #5: We will utilize intrinsic motivation and curiosity as primary motivators for the Tribe, our Faculty, and our Students.

Principle #6: Diversity is strength. All sociopolitical ideologies working together open-mindedly and cooperatively are necessary to produce a fully functional Tribe, School, and Community. We hate echo chambers of any sort. 

Principle #7: Every member of the Tribe, School, and Community are both teachers and learners. Everyone is expected to contribute their knowledge, skills, and experiences to improve the collective.

Organization -Structure and People

Role of the Tribe

The Tribe is the heart and soul of this Project. Made up of hungry, humble, people-smart members, the Tribe uses the School as a conduit to make our world a better place.

The Tribe is the School's compass assuring it stays on the right path and act as the School's cultural stewards, which includes developing the mission statement, vision, goals, and guiding principles. The Tribe also runs the Administration, Academics, and Projects. The Tribe provides all the tools necessary for the Faculty and Students to do good in our Community. 

The School, in turn, supports the Tribe by providing for their five basic human needs, which is loosely based on the relationship between Native American tribes and casinos. 

The Tribe serves as brokers for knowledge, skills, and wisdom in our Community. This allows the Tribe to develop symbiotic relationships with individuals, businesses, and organizations within our Community. The Tribe is about connecting people and ideas in meaningful ways. 

Tribe Members can also be Faculty or Students, and may take classes free of charge.

Departments

The "Academic" division of the School is divided by Departments based on groups of expertise. The Department is a way for Faculty from related fields to easily collaborate. Inter-Department collaboration is encouraged.

Departments can be started with a minimum of two Faculty members is a related area. New Departments will be given a blog and Youtube channel, and start with zero budget. After completing three successful Projects, the Department may petition the Tribe for funding for Projects.

Each department will have an organic goal setting session once per year for the entire department, needs their own principles, goals, and vision, and need to have at least one problem to solve that will make community better per term.

Faculty

The Faculty have two primary roles - teach classes and propose, plan, and complete Projects. No formal requirements are needed for Faculty other than they meet the Tribe criteria (hungry, humble, and people smart), and have ideas, knowledge, skills, or wisdom to share.

Faculty have access to physical space within the school to teach classes and complete Projects, have access to the department blog, and have access to the Department Youtube channel.

The total number of Tribe Members, Faculty, and Students will not exceed 100 per term.

Faculty will develop novel, creative ways to teach their subject area expertise to others in the community effectively, and teach others how to utilize their methods. The goal is to continually refine our methods to make them simpler, cheaper, more efficient, and more effective.

Faculty and their families can take classes for free.

Students

Our students will come from our local community, and will include anyone with an interest in the classes being offered.

Operations

Curriculum

 Our initial curriculum will focus on the expertise of the Members of our Tribe, and the Teachers we have immediately available. This will likely include the teaching of primitive skills, self-improvement, health, fitness, and self-defense. In addition to our Tribe already possessing the knowledge to teach these topics, these are also valuable skills that can create an immediate positive impact on individual members of our community. 

Our Founding Members of our Tribe are currently curating a list of possible topics to be taught. 

In the future, our curriculum will widen to include any topic that is of interest to our teachers and students, of value to the Tribe, or will improve our community.

Scheduling and Cohorts

The School will operate on a "term" schedule, much like colleges and universities. We will have a fall and winter term lasting 16 weeks, and a summer term lasting eight weeks. Classes may be offered for shorter periods of time within each term. 

The purpose of the terms is to facilitate planning, give our Faculty the opportunity to spend time working on Projects or plan vacations, make payments easier to collect and process, and make improvements to our facilities. 

Each term, students will be organized into a Cohort, which will be used as another opportunity to build social connections between the Tribe, Faculty, and Students. The Cohort will meet at the beginning and end of the Term at an event planned by the Tribe. The end-of-term event will feature a Conference/ Party for Faculty and Students to present their Projects.

Each Cohort will elect a Student Council who will represent Student Interests at the Tribe meetings held monthly. The Student Council will work in conjunction with the Tribe Social Committee to plan the end-of-term Conference/ Party.

Classes

Classes can be different lengths, but the typical class will be one term long. Classes will be planned eight weeks before the beginning of a Term to allow for schedules to be produced, facility use to be determined, and distributed and students to be recruited. 

Every class should begin and end with a five to ten minute social session. The purpose of this is to increase social bonding, thus increase the sense of belonging among students.

Projects

Projects are the equivalent to research conducted by university professors. The Projects will be something tangible that uses Faculty expertise and collaboration with the Tribe, Students, and Community to make real, tangible improvements to our community.

All projects must be: Cheap, simple, effective, no unintended consequences, make our community better in a tangible, measurable way, and is enjoyable (fun, play, etc.) 

All projects approved by Tribe, sort of like Human Subjects Board, uses holistic goal setting. Faculty and Students present results at Conference Parties at the end of each term. Ongoing projects present what they've learned thus far. All of this is written up and kept in searchable database (the equivalent of our "journal."

Department needs three successful projects done at zero cost before they can ask for funding, individual faculty need two.

Campus (Homestead)

The Tribe will purchase land and build structures to support the Tribe and School.

Eventual goal is to allow faculty and Tribe to live on area of homestead to allow for collaboration. Homestead needs living quarters for Tribe and Faculty, areas to use for teaching purposes,.a shooting range, a great hall, a community kitchen, a community garden, etc.

Finances

 

The School finances use Profit First methodology and Dave Ramsey financial concepts - no debt, emergency funds for one year of operations with zero income, and all the things related to stockpiling (prepping) for one year of no outside help. The Tribe and School will also help individual community members (families) do the same by teaching these skills.

Everything will be done on lowest budget possible (free if possible) ala school computer lab idea from Kenowa Hills.

 

Income streams will come from student tuition, our retail operation (online and brick and mortar), information products we produce, other goods and services we produce, affiliate marketing, ads, and any other streams we identify.

 

Spreading the Idea

 

All aspects of the Tribe and School will be designed as a series of simple systems that can be used anywhere, which will allow the idea to be spread elsewhere. 

Conclusion

 

This is obviously a VERY convoluted first draft of the School model. While it is not complete, I needed to get the ideas out into the world for much-needed critical input. More than most parts of the project, I REALLY need feedback on this one. If you have any thoughts, ideas, or suggestions, either leave a comment here on the blog, OR join our Facebook Group here. 

~Jason

 

 

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The Importance of Curiosity

 

 “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.”
― Albert Einstein

Curiosity just might be the most powerful force in the universe. It's the motivation that's never exhausted. Curiosity is the engine of learning. Curiosity is the driver of innovation and positive change. Great things, amazing things, are routinely accomplished through curiosity. Spark a person's curiosity and you give them the ammunition to conquer the world.

Or something like that.

The science of motivation tells us curiosity is one of the most powerful intrinsic motivators there is. Humans inherently love learning. Our brains are the most complex structure in the known universe for a reason. Curiosity and that love of learning is what drives me to develop this project, and it's no coincidence it's a foundation of our Tribe and our School.

I've long been interested in curiosity. As a public school teacher, I've long understood the sheer value of sparking curiosity in my students. It makes the entire school experience for students infinitely better if they want to be there because they're curious. Grades improve, retention and the ability to apply ideas and concepts gets way better, behavior problems disappear, students become empowered and have the ability to solve real problems, etc.

Unfortunately, it's exceptionally difficult to spark curiosity in a public school setting, at least among every kid. Class sizes are simply too big, we waste too much time preparing for and taking standardized tests, and we have too many required classes and strict curricula. We certainly try; every administrator, teacher, and support staff knows the inherent value of fostering curiosity. The systems, just too big, too impersonal, and too structured. Curiosity requires freedom and maneuverability. Curiosity requires flexibility and the removal of barriers. Our schools can't provide this because we expend all our resources trying to meet totally unrealistic expectations. 

Our School will utilize curiosity as a basic foundation of everything we do, from deciding which classes to offer to deciding who will teach them to exactly what students will learn. In future posts, I'll expand on this idea. But curiosity is also hard-wired into everything we do. Including our Tribe.

“Listen with curiosity. Speak with honesty. Act with integrity. The greatest problem with communication is we don’t listen to understand. We listen to reply. When we listen with curiosity, we don’t listen with the intent to reply. We listen for what’s behind the words.”
― Roy T. Bennett

Our Tribe (and our gym) is filled with genuinely curious people, which includes curiosity about each other. If you eavesdrop on any conversation at our gym, they're never like "so how's the weather" conversations. They're conversations about who were are, what we do, what motivates us to train, or other deeply-inquisitive questioning. It's clearly obvious we have a gym filled with people who listen to understand. 

It's no surprise our gym is filled with people who experience grand adventures; their curiosity towards each other applies to a curiosity about life. And that curiosity about life is what pushes us to experience new, exciting things. It's what allows us to overcome fear and experience real adventure.

It's rare in today's world, and it's one of the things I think makes us a little different. It's why I think we can make a real dent in the universe.

~Jason

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Changing the World By Starting Local

 

If you spend any time watching Ted Talks, you know there's a whole lotta people out there who have a whole lotta great ideas. Ideas that can literally change the world. The problem, of course, is implementation. Most of the people I've met who care enough to make a real dent in the Universe suffer from the problem of scale. The world is a pretty damn big place. Where do you even start?

It's the classic "how to eat an elephant" conundrum that Tutu dude once talked about. As you stand there looking up at the elephant, the sheer size of the beast is absolutely overwhelming. The only way to approach it is to take one bite at a time. Same deal when I used to run ultramarathons. Running 100 miles is a daunting task. So you break it down into sections, each one a few miles long. As fatigue and abject pain set in at 3am and you're freezing cold and surrounded by darkness, sometimes you break it down to "that stick on the side of the trail eight feet in front of me." You do what you have to do.

When I set out to start this goofy "School run by a Tribe" idea, I had a pretty explicit goal in mind - I wanted to make the world a better place. The venomous divisions created throughout our society troubled me deeply, and I thought I had a pretty good solution. But one dude with a tiny team of passionate idealists, a crappy blog, and zero cash ain't gonna move the needle on the world scale. Or the national scale. Hell, even the state looks pretty daunting right now. 

So I'm starting with our community. That's the goal. Make Montrose, Colorado the best damn place to live on the entire planet. If I can accomplish that, if we can figure out the blueprint for making this place amazing, figuring out what works here, then we can get the momentum to take bigger bites.

~Jason

 

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The Flawed Martial Arts Model, Part Two: The Solution - Our Tribe and Our School

 

In the first post, I outlined the historical roots of the modern martial arts schools in the United States, and how commercialization has caused a litany of problems. Read that post before diving into this one. In this post, I'll outline how our model solves these problems.

The Brief Summary of Our Model

Our gym offers two programs right now  -Brazilian jiu jitsu and mixed martial arts, which includes an adult program and a kids program. We have about six coaches and somewhere in the ballpark of 25 students. The model we're building will eventually expand beyond martial arts into teaching other classes, such as primitive survival skills (among others), which is how we will expand to generate greater revenue.As such, I will refer to the gym as "The School."

The School, instead of being run by a "Master" as we see in the typical martial arts school model, will be run by our Tribe. The Tribe will replace not only the Master, but also the Master's Disciples. While we haven't actually set up the framework yet, the Tribe itself will likely use a shared ownership model for the School. This diffuses the responsibility of running the School among a group of people, which allows us to leverage individual expertise to tackle the different roles needed to run a successful school. The School won't rely on a single Master acting as a jack-of-ass-trades, which will improve the health of the business. Got a Tribe member who's an exceptional salesperson? They recruit new students. How about a marketing expert? They sell the School to the community. Is there a Tribe member who's a financial geek? They handle the books. And so on.

The real advantage of the Tribe, however, comes from the diffusion of expertise. In the Old Commercial Model, the Master was THE expert. They were expected to know all the "secrets" of the martial art and slowly passed those secrets to their loyal, dedicated disciples. That model doesn't work when the entire operation is commercialized, which I discussed in Part One. The Tribe assumes this role, so expertise no longer resides within one person, but rather the collective. Different Tribe Members have their own areas of expertise, which can then be shared with other Tribe Members and, importantly, the School's paying Students. 

This is kind of like the typical MMA gym is organized, where different coaches teach their different disciplines. Our model differs in that the Tribe is a closely-bonded social group, which will allow for a far more collaborative approach. In essence, the Tribe will have a vested interest in making each other better, thus increasing the sharing of knowledge while simultaneously decreasing the intra-team conflict that can sometimes occur among coaches.

This model creates a clear divide between the Tribe and the Students, where the entire Tribe benefits from the financial success of the School and the Students pay tuition to learn from the School. This clear divide solves the litany of problems with the Old Commercial Model, which monetizes the Master/ Disciple relationship. 

Adopting the University Structure

In our model, the Tribe's collective knowledge is taught to Students in the form of classes offered through the school, but the classes offered would be limited to the knowledge base of the individual Members of the Tribe. This would limit the breadth and depth of classes offered to the collecting knowledge of the Tribe. We solve this limitation by also crating a group that would be analogous to university Professors. 

University professors generally serve two roles within the university setting- they teach classes and they do research to advance their field of expertise. In our School model, our "Professors" would teach any classes that would appeal to members of the Montrose community. If someone knows what they're talking about and there's a market to learn those skills, we provide the space to bring those "Professors" and Students together. Initially, we'll probably focus on primitive survival skills because they're in demand, we have people who can teach them, and they're tangentially-related to martial arts. 

Our school would also embrace the "research" role Professors fulfill by encouraging our Professors to collaborate with other Professors, conduct experiments, and develop their field of expertise. As an example, let's say we have two Professors who have knowledge about building shelter in survival situations, but have two differing philosophies. We would provide the physical space to give them the opportunity to collaborate to develop the best survival shelters possible. 

Another example - let's say we have three jiu jitsu coaches who each have very different philosophies on teaching jiu jitsu. They could collaborate and experiment with different teaching strategies to develop better methods of teaching jiu jitsu. Because this model is inherently collaborative in nature, we also eliminate a great deal of the ego-related issues typically found in the Old Commercial Model.

In this model, the Tribe and the School get qualified expert "Professors" for classes to deliver to our Students, the Tribe attracts more Students from a wider cross-section of our community (thus making more money), the "Professors" get an opportunity to develop their own expertise through collaboration and experimentation, and the "Professors" would make extra money teaching what they love. It's a great model for proving a mutually-beneficial environment for all parties involved AND will provide a clearinghouse of sorts for important knowledge within our wider community. In short, this will make Montrose a better place to live.

The Real Benefit to Our Tribe

This model creates a lot of benefits for a lot of people, but the most important benefit is it provides a safe, secure, well-equipped physical space for our Tribe to train and socialize. If we relied on the Old Commercial Model, as we have since we bought the gym, we're perpetually teetering on the brink of financial collapse. This is especially true given the realities of COVID. 

If we were to continue with the Old Commercial Model, we would have to spend a great deal of time and money marketing to an ever-shrinking pool of potential students just to pay the bills. This also forces us to accept students who may not be a good fit with our culture (we project kindness, open-minded acceptance, and compassion, but also love hard, smashing, violent training... and also dick jokes.) Or worse, it might force us to accept student who are a danger to our current Students, which is ethically, morally, and financially unacceptable. 

This model prevents this by giving us near-unlimited potential revenue streams, gives us the ability to really leverage cheap-but-effective word of mouth advertising, and allows our Tribe to make important connections with key members of our community who have specialized knowledge in a wide range of topics. And it allows us to maintain our physical facilities for training and socializing for the Tribe. 

Conclusion

This model is still in the development phase and is mostly a collection of theories and ideas. Ergo the somewhat fractured nature of this post. :-) In the coming days and weeks, our Tribe's Founding Members will begin discussing the ins and outs of this model with the goal of officially launching it by the beginning of March. As the ideas evolve, I will continue to post the details as they evolve.

If you want to learn more about the structure of the school, check out this post. And this post about the underlying theory. 

If you dig this project and are interested in helping develop the ideas, consider joining our Think Tank Facebook group, which can be found here.

~Jason

 

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The Flawed Martial Arts School Model: Part One - The Historical Root of the Problem

 

The business model we use for martial arts instruction in the United States, today, royally sucks. Since taking over ownership of a Brazilian jiu jitsu gym in September of '19, I’ve been fully immersed in the joys and pains of the industry. And the typical model we use has a lot more pains than joys.

After a good deal of research, experimentation, and synthesizing of past experiences and new ideas, I’ve come to the conclusion that a great deal of the pain caused by gym ownership is a direct result of the business model almost all of us use in some capacity. In short, martial arts businesses, including jiu jitsu gyms, use a model that attempts to marry the traditions and structures of ancient Eastern martial arts with modern American business practices.

And it’s not a happy marriage.

Every gym owner I know struggles with the same issues, which I’ll detail later. But these problems inevitably cause gym owners to experience significant burn-out, lose friendships, lose interest in the art they love, and in many cases, lose money.

So what’s the cause of these problems? To fully understand WHY the system we use causes so many problems, we have to do a bit of digging into history.

How Martial Arts Used to Be Taught

Martial arts used to be taught for war (ergo the “martial” part.) It was training that would help you beat your opponent on the battlefield. As such, martial arts instructors and their training was subsidized by the military or government. If you were a soldier in the military, you’d receive martial arts training as part of the overall military training.

Martial arts would also sometimes be taught to civilians for self-defense purposes. In this case, the “business model” was somewhat similar to that which we use today in the US. You’d have an expert (a “master”) who had a long-standing, strong reputation within their communities. This may have been because their families had passed the art from generation to generation, or it may have been based on their particular culture. Because each culture only had one or a very small number of different “arts”, masters were rare.

The generic situation under this model worked something like this. If you wanted to learn a martial art, you would get instruction from a local master for a period of time. If you were really good OR had interest in learning the art to the point where you yourself would become a master some day, you’d petition your master to accept you as a “disciple.” If your master accepted you as a disciple, you’d enter into a special long-term relationship defined by trust, loyalty, and mutual obligation.

The nature of this relationship was much more involved than that of a teacher/ student relationship. It became much more like a parent/ child relationship. The master would guide and teach their disciple (or disciples) in every aspect of the art, and the disciple would in turn help take care of the master and support them by providing things like food, housing, etc. This was generally a lifelong commitment. THIS is the model that American martial arts businesses attempt to replicate.

A critically-important key to this model - the MASTER holds the power in the relationship, not the DISCIPLE. The disciple must seek and earn the approval of the master to reach disciple status and must continue to earn the approval of the master to continue their journey. The goal of this process is to essentially assure the art is only taught to individuals who have the character to use the art for noble, virtuous purposes. You don’t want to teach serial killers how to get better at killing.

So Where Did This Model Go Wrong?

When martial arts started exploding in the United States in the late 60’s and early 70’s (due to World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the explosion of martial arts TV and movies), there was a sudden, powerful demand by the American consumer to learn these martial arts. So the earliest instructors (“masters”) to open schools in the United States had to adopt a particular business model that would solve a critical problem - since there is no familial or cultural knowledge of martial arts in general or instructors in particular that gave the instructors a positive reputation, these early instructors had to create their own reputations.

To accomplish that, they had to sell themselves to their prospective students. Martial arts transitioned from a cultural staple rooted in a culture’s historical warrior class passed down through deeply-connected master/ disciple relationships to a commercialized service industry. This shift, which seems rather trivial, was critically important in explaining our current problems because it shifted the power dynamic.

Instead of the well-known, well-respected master granting qualified, motivated individuals to become loyal disciples, now unknown “masters” had to sell themselves to prospective students who were free to pick and choose any instructor they wanted in any art available at any time.

Capitalism 101.

Normally this is a good thing. Competition leads to improvement as service providers battle to provide the best service value for their students. Unfortunately for the martial arts industry, the very nature of martial arts included all kinds of customs and concepts that were mostly incompatible with a system where the student controlled the power dynamic of the relationship. So this new hybrid model produced all kinds of problems.

How This Hybrid Model Brought About the McDojo Problem

The early martial arts masters in the US were selling a recreational service that competed with every other recreational service business in their area. They had to sell themselves to prospective students, then provide quality service in a way that retained the students as long as possible. For every student lost, a new one would need to be recruited. All to pay the bills.

It didn’t take long for the martial arts masters to realize the commercialization of martial arts causes all kinds of problems. The master/ disciple relationship had changed because the master was no longer the power broker. In the old system, disciples were essentially bonded to their master through good and bad through cultural tradition. Under the American commercialized system, the disciples were free to leave at any time for another master, another art, or even a completely different recreational activity. They were, after all, paying customers.

In the old system, the martial arts masters were irreplaceable cultural icons to be revered and respected. In the United States, teachers of any kind are viewed as replaceable cogs in a big machine. Even martial arts masters.

Under the threat of constantly losing paying customers, martial art school owners had to start generating revenue through other streams, like requiring specific uniforms purchased from the school owner, testing fees for belts and the creation of more belts, a lowering of standards of the art, and, because it became important to recruit as many new students as possible, deceptive advertising. This also led to the proliferation of echo chambers where really stupid ideas flourish (like “death touch” techniques.) Essentially, this commercialization of the martial arts model forced owners to make compromises that are not in the students’ best interests in order to pay the bills. 

Despite the obvious problems this hybrid business model creates, the commercialized recreational martial art model has been used for pretty much every martial art that has been brought to the United States. Including Brazilian jiu jitsu.

How BJJ Adopted the Model

Back in the late 70’s, Rorion Gracie was primarily responsible for bringing a commercialized version of Brazilian jiu jitsu to the United States. It’s an interesting story, including the back story to the development of the modern day UFC mixed martial arts promotion. His primary goal was simple - bring the art here to America to make cash. Which he did.

In the process, Rorion set the tone that would shape the development of BJJ here in the US, which was the same tone other martial arts had previously followed - Jiu jitsu businesses became commercial recreational martial arts businesses.

Today, we see the effects of this on almost every jiu jitsu school in the country. There will be one “master” (usually a black belt) who is responsible for disseminating information to the rest of the school, which is often made up of students ranging from first-day noobs to gristled veterans. Dissent is discouraged; the master is assumed to have all the answers. Authority is not questioned. Collaboration with others outside the school (or lineage) is strongly discouraged and oftentimes punished. Loyalty to the master and the school is a must; people who show disloyalty are branded a “creonte” and socially-shunned. Innovation is limited to the degree of open-mindedness of the master. When students reach a certain degree of proficiency, they’re often expected to assume an instructor role. And so on.

This system creates all kinds of issues like intra- and inter-school drama, ego issues, high turnover, and the problem of students leaving to start their own schools and taking students in the process. It forces owners to spend a disproportionate amount of time generating and following up on leads for new students, teaching a re-teaching the same boring basics to the constant flow of new students coming through the door, teaching too many classes at inconvenient times, constantly having to chase students down to collect payments, and a host of other problems that make school ownership pretty shitty.

The real problem, though, is this commercialized recreational service model is poorly-designed to maximize the potential of the information age. The old master/ disciple model worked in part because the knowledge the master held was incredibly rare. Given we have the Internet, this is no longer the case. There are approximately 275,000 videos available on the Internet about arm bars alone, and many of these videos feature knowledge from the very best competitors and instructors in the sport.

Like pretty much any knowledge today, knowledge about jiu jitsu is abundant and free. KNOWING the information is now virtually worthless. The real value is being able to FILTER the information to determine what is useful and worthless. The real value is being able to synthesize the information. The real value is being able to teach this synthesized information. Anybody can now access WHAT to teach. What we need today are people who know HOW to teach. And our business model is terrible at that. Severely impedes it, even.

The Solution

Our School/ Tribe model was partially designed to remedy this entire issue. Our jiu jitsu classes (and to a lesser extent, our mma classes) are sacred in that we really need them to survive. The physical and mental benefits our team derives from those classes is one of the more important parts of our lives. As such, this was among the highest priorities in designing the framework of this plan- WE NEED A PLACE TO TRAIN.

The gist - the Tribe will essentially run the program, replacing the "Master" and "Disciples." This diffuses the weird power gradient that simply doesn't play well as a business model. Because the Tribe is already, by design, a closely-connected unit, there's no weird "loyalty" crap. The Tribe is free to use expertise from any and all sources because the entire operation clearly, explicitly benefits both the Tribe and the Students.

Psychologically, this simple distinction of "Tribe" and "Student" creates much clearer roles, and should eliminate a lot of the common problems we see in the current models. In future posts, I'll go into great detail on HOW this could be implemented.

~Jason

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Project Summary: The 30,000 Foot View 1.0

 

This is a brief summary of the actual project that outlines where we are right now, and where we're heading. This will be the official "start" of the project. That direction we're heading will likely change a bit, so I'll update this plan with other versions.

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 ju 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, and three other members, which we designate as the "Founding Members." Since we haven't formally launched the project, I won't use their names until I get their permission. 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. While we haven't developed a formal vetting process, it will involve utilizing 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, 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.

What are the Elements and Goals of the Planned End Product

The project will consist of two primary elements: The School and The Tribe. These two entities will have a symbiotic relationship. The School provides for the Tribe, and the Tribe administers the School.

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, 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 be an extension of the jiu jitsu and mma gym we're currently operating. We'll expand the classes offered in the beginning to include a few classes that will be taught by members of the Tribe. 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 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. 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.

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. 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 one of the vetting tools we'll utilize to find and assess potential Tribe members.

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. 

Conclusion

As I said at the beginning of this post, this is a tentative outline. 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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