On the fifth of July, the Monday right after the Fourth, Amy and Claire and I drove over to watch my son Gage get his first colored belt. I was nervous, and going to see my son roll doesn’t usually make me nervous but today was a bit different.
The Beginning
He started training on March 14th of 2025, so this was well over a year in the making. For a kid, the first colored belt is gray with a white stripe running down the middle. Technically it is still a beginner's belt. But here is the thing that got me. It is not white anymore. It is colored. And after more than a year of showing up, that little stripe of color meant something.
I will be honest with you. We were not going as much as we probably should have. There were a lot of moving parts, a lot of confusion, a lot of regular life getting in the way. That is part of why it took as long as it did, and part of why it felt so good to finally watch it happen. The belts after this one will come faster. But this first one, the slow one, the one we had to grind out over more than a year, was the one worth driving over for. It was a really, really neat day, sitting there with my wife and my daughter watching him earn it.
Big Goals Take Time
Here is the first big idea I keep coming back to, and it is the reason I wanted to write this down at all.
The really worthwhile goals take a long time. You do not get them in a weekend. You chip away at it, and you chip away at it, and you chip away at it some more. When you see somebody standing there with a black belt around their waist, you see the black belt. You do not see the journey. You did not watch the thousand ordinary days it took to get there. And that is exactly the lesson I want my kids to learn early, because it is true everywhere, not just on the mat.
If you are going to build a billion dollar business, it does not show up overnight. It starts as a zero dollar business. Then you slowly chip away at it until one day it is a billion dollar business. That is how every great thing gets built. Slowly, quietly, one unglamorous day at a time. To be able to teach Gage that through something real, something he can feel in his own body instead of just hear me lecture about, is worth more than I can say.
The Bonding Time
The next thing I have been absolutely loving is that he and I get to roll together.
I think about how fathers and sons used to wrestle and play fight, probably since the beginning of time, as a way to prepare boys for life. This has given the two of us a way to be physical with each other, hard even, but in a completely safe way. And the bond that has come out of that has been one of the best surprises of the whole thing. It forced me to get into jiu-jitsu myself, to learn it, and honestly to fall in love with it, which I have. It gives me something to actually do with him. I get to watch him grow, and he gets to watch me progress too, even if he gives me a hard time about it. He likes to tell me I just get people into awkward positions but I do not really know jiu-jitsu. And you know what, he is right. I do not always know what I am doing yet. But I am learning as fast as I possibly can, and getting teased by my kid along the way is a pretty great problem to have.
When I zoom way out, the timeline on this is wild to think about. If he keeps going, he will have his blue belt around 16, and somewhere in his mid twenties he will have his black belt. Now, I know there are plenty of black belts in the world. I know there are plenty of people who know jiu-jitsu. I get that. But it is still a genuinely rare and cool thing to accomplish. Not everyone has it. It is still rare air. And that is a really cool thing to carry with you into the rest of your life.
The Confidence
The part I did not fully see coming is the confidence.
I love the self defense piece, especially for my daughter, who is also training now. I am going to write about her too as she keeps going, and for sure when she earns her first belt. But watching Gage specifically, it is the confidence that has floored me. He is more interested in weightlifting now. And I keep thinking about how he is going to carry this confidence into sport, into school, into academics, into college, into his first job, into all of it. This stuff builds character in a way almost nothing else does. Being able to hand my son something like that feels almost impossible to put a price on.
I have to tell one funny story. One of his buddies asked him if he thought he would keep going all the way to black belt. Before Gage could even answer, I jumped right in and said, he does not have a choice. And now I half joke to people that my kids are not getting a dime of any inheritance until they have their black belt. It is not true, of course. But it points at how I actually think about this. This is the one thing I want them to go finish before they are allowed to take the easy street, because it teaches everything I have come to believe is important.
Get Comfortable, Being Uncomfortable
And that gets me to the real heart of it.
You learn everything through discomfort. Comfort teaches you absolutely nothing. And jiu-jitsu is discomfort from every direction. It is physically uncomfortable. It is emotionally uncomfortable. It is awkward, up close and personal with people you barely know, doing something you are not good at yet. Frankly it is just an uncomfortable thing to go do. Which is the whole point. Getting comfortable being uncomfortable is one of the biggest ideas I have learned in my whole life, and if you look at every big goal I have ever set for myself, every single one is something hard, something long, and something deeply uncomfortable.
For me this ties straight into my faith and my relationship with God. You find out who you really are when you push yourself all the way to the brink. You will never actually know who you are until you get to that point. Most people do not want to know. They do not want to find out what is over that ridge-line. I do. I have always wanted to know. And more than anything, I want my kids to know too.
So watching Gage do this, and watching Claire start down the same road, is one of the greater joys of my life. It is one of the things I will push for until my dying day. That he keeps going until that black belt is around his waist. And then, of course, he still will not be done, because there is always more to learn. That is the beauty of it. My hope is that this becomes a lifelong pursuit for both of them.
You see the black belt. You do not see the journey. But I get a front row seat to his, and there is nothing I would trade for it.