Get on offensive cycles

A few years ago, as I was preparing for my first-ever jiujitsu competition, my coach gave me a simple piece of advice that has stuck with me: “get on offensive cycles.”

In jiujitsu, the advice is straightforward. Don’t settle into defensive positions; get on offense and chain attacks together; if your opponent escapes, make sure they’re escaping directly into another threat. Here’s a simple example: if you get to closed guard, don’t rest. Fire an armbar attack. If they free the arm, fire the triangle. If they free the head from the triangle, fire the omoplata. If they forward roll out of the omoplata, attack the armbar again…etc., etc.

What you find in most rolls is that if you’re constantly attacking, your opponent is forced to play defensively. You take all of the offensive momentum and you make your opponent play your game. Almost everyone who’s rolled has felt both sides of this. You know exactly how exhausting it is to defend non-stop attacks and how demoralizing it is to escape a bad position only to find yourself in another bad position. On the flip side, you know how exhilarating it is to feel the exhaustion and demoralization of your opponent while you string together attacks.

This concept shouldn’t be limited to the mats.

At the time my coach gave me the advice, I was in a weird spot in my life and career. About a year earlier, I had bought my first house and moved from Tennessee to South Dakota, where I knew next to no one. The house was a complete fixer-upper. Great bones, but in desperate need of work on both the interior and the exterior. Just as I started renovations, I was unexpectedly laid off from a job that I loved. Having just spent most of my savings on a house and a cross-country move, I didn’t have the luxury of taking any time off. This meant two things. First, I needed to start looking for a new job immediately. Second, any time and money spent on home renovations needed to be put on pause.

The job market was brutal. I spent hours every day looking for roles and submitting applications. After 6 months and well over 1,000 applications, I finally landed a new role. Two weeks into my new position, the company announced org-wide layoffs, and I was right back on the job hunt. I was demoralized. I went 6 months without steady income, and I was living in a house that desperately needed work in a city where I knew almost nobody. I felt like life was stringing together attacks while I was stuck playing defense.

And that’s when my coach gave me the advice: “get on offensive cycles.”

Sure, he was talking about jiujitsu, but it resonated with me beyond that. I went home that night and cold DM’d multiple recruiters about positions I had applied to but hadn’t heard back from. I bought the domain name for Crowd Card, registered the company as an LLC, created social media accounts, began building the marketing page, and started to sketch out the design for the app. I made a list of all of the projects that needed to be done around the house and began to put together a budget for each one. I was doing everything I could think of to get on offensive cycles. As small as these tasks were, I needed to shift my mind out of defense and onto offense.

Within a few days, I heard back from one of the recruiters and ultimately landed at that company as an IC. Crowd Card has grown from an idea to a fully functional app available on web and mobile. Building Crowd Card as a solo founder taught me how to start a company, design products, develop both web and mobile apps, advertise, network with other entrepreneurs, and much more. My continued work on Crowd Card is what put me in touch with the founders of Silk Pyjamas, who brought me in as an engineer. The backend infrastructure I built for Crowd Card laid the foundation for Refology, a web app I launched last month. I’ve slowly checked off boxes on the home renovations list I made, including replacing the flooring, siding, windows, exterior doors, building front and back porches, and more.

So my point is this: Get on offensive cycles. Stop playing defense while life comes at you. What you’ll find is that even small “attacks” – a cold DM about a job, buying a domain name, sketching out an app idea, creating a simple to-do list – can end up becoming the first in a chain of actions that lead to real, meaningful progress.