One Blue Belt’s Perspective, Four Years Later

It has become an annual tradition for me for me to write a blog post about jiu-jitsu on the anniversary of my first-ever class in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ). Today marks four years since I first walked into the basement of 36 W. Broadway in South Boston for my first class and never looked back.

There are many things of which I am proud of myself with regard to BJJ in the last year, in particular, including but not limited to:

• Staying in some degree of fighting shape during the pandemic.
• Placing in an Adult Grand Slam competition and winning my first World Masters title.
• Successfully cutting weight and feeling strong while competing in a lower weight class — something I’d never thought I’d do for a number of reasons.
• Earning the final two stripes on my blue belt.
• Taking a few transformative and memorable out-of-town BJJ-driven adventures, most notably to Mexico City and New York City.
• Bonding with — and being inspired by — a cohort of new women at my gym.

But of all the things of which I am proud, the one of which I am proudest is this:

• Knowing when I’ve gotten too comfortable and need to make a change.

When I visited Boston for an interview in June 2012, there was a touch of magic as I walked out of the doors of South Station into the summer breeze of Dewey Square. “This is the place you are supposed to be,” I thought to myself. I had decided that even if I didn’t get the job I was interviewing for, I was going to move to Boston. Three weeks later, with that job offer, I arrived and settled into my new life in the new city.

My first office for my first job: as a researcher at HBS in Boston

Then I stayed — for almost a decade: for that job, then graduate school, then three more jobs. I easily could have stayed for another three jobs and turned the almost-decade into three decades. I would have hated myself for it, but I might have done it unwittingly, letting the time elapse and mindlessly moving through the typical, scripted stages of a privileged East Coast life: from post-collegiate freedom to marital bliss to parental responsibility to comfortable retirement. However the script is supposed to go, knowing the kind of person I am, I’d have followed it and…