Rickson Gracie

Just being able to focus and be strategically correct is not enough.

I have to have the spirituality to say, today is a great day to be in a battle.

If I had to depart today from a different dimension, I would be grateful to get here that far.

So I was accepting death in order to be comfortable in hell.

Because how a fireman can leave home disregarding the possibility he can be the last day.

Because he can be and try to save a kid in a building and die.

How a police officer can leave home without knowing the possibilities he may have to get shot.

If you don't realistically believe on those possibilities, you should not be a police officer, you should not be a fireman, you should not be a fighter like myself in that kind of perspective of unpredictability.

Being an athlete, being a sport like a judo or MMA, which has rules, has time limits, has weight divisions, those are pretty much predictable.

It's a sport, it's a very interesting, a very brutal, a very contact, a very aggressive sport, but it's still a sport.

Martial arts transcends that.

Because martial arts, I have to feed my students

with unpredictable situations for them to start to realize they have a chance when everything is go dark, when everything goes like, if I have a knife against you, so I don't know what to do.

So pay attention, calm, just put your hand here.

So I start to build up confidence.

I start to build up situations where the guy will feel

I'm supposed to be dead here, but I have a chance.

So building that windows of opportunity, windows of chances, I've been creating myself as a confident in possibilities.

So I'm not going there to lose or to compete.

I go there to preach or to do what I know and be sure I'm going to win.