Start Working on your After-Fighting Career Now.
So you’re a fighter. Very cool. That has its really good points and some serious “reality checks” as well. It means your career can be put on hold at any time for recovery from injuries, with the added uncertainty of not knowing if you WILL recover completely from that torn ACL, etc. While recovering and fighting the pain of rehab, etc, losing some Twitter followers, even a few, can completely bum you out for days. Been there, done that, got a dead guy ACL in me. Also you can lose a couple tough decisions and get cut from the big show, or never get there in the first place.
The point is that fighters talk about, wonder about, think about, etc. what they are going to do after fighting. That means that the longer you fight, the farther away that second career is. IMHO and the opinion of most thinkers a lot smarter than I am, that is not the way to do it. Start on that career NOW. The longer you work on it, the closer to reality (and making a living) it gets.
You don’t know what you want to do after fighting? Then your second career, which you should start on right away, is figuring that out.
Best book on the subject? Probably What Color is your Parachute by Richard Bolles.
Read Chapter 13 on “Inventory of What you Have to Offer the World”. Don’t read the index at the back called A Guide to Dealing with Unemployment Depression. That is for the “others” that you are going to outwork and outperform. You already know how to handle and overcome the depression part of things or you wouldn’t still be in the fight game, right?
Finding a job (a career after your fighting days are over) is a skill in and of itself. Think about why you are a fighter, or maybe why other people are fighters. In the early days, reasonably good athletes with little background in fighting but who loved it could make professional headway. Not any more. Now the skill level required is much higher, plus you also need some top of the line physical gifts. Have too many slow twitch muscle fibers? Arms too short? Brain doesn’t rotate inside your skull as well as other people’s? Better look for something else to do — and start looking now.
But there is good news, too. If you are fighting, you are already way ahead of most other people in some very important attributes. You obviously don’t quit; you are extremely coachable; your work ethic is hard to beat. You understand there are winners and losers. You are there to make it on your own, not to be coddled or given anything for free. You understand media, both regular TV and print media as well as social media. You may have thousands of people (Twitter followers) who are interested in you, who like you, who believe in you and want to know what you are doing (hard to believe, huh?:) List a few other things here that you do well. Have friends in or from Brazil? Speak Portuguese? (Sim, eu falo.). Figure out what you have going for you. For some, the best way to do this is to ask your coach, or a good friend.
God didn’t make very many people who can jump the highest, or who are going to hold the belt in a given weight class for ten years. But we all have different sets of skills — some things we are very good at, more that we can “kinda” do, and a lot of things we know nothing about. The trick is to find something that uses the skills you do well and that stays away from what you don’t know about. And if there is a skill set you don’t have that is a prerequisite to that thing you would like to do in the future, start learning it. Now.
Here is one way, at least in theory, that will help you figure this out. Lay back, close your eyes…. nah, with you guys that won’t work; you will be asleep in about thirty seconds. Sit someplace where it is quiet, and imagine that it is twenty years from now. (Believe it or not, twenty years from now, twenty years will have passed, and today will seem like it happened about six months ago… that’s the way it works.)
Now, in this future retired-from fighting reality, figure out what you want it to look like. Are you waking up in Vegas? Rio? Portland? Do you have a spouse and kids? (First draft of this said wife and kids, but because I met Amanda Lucas recently, I changed it…. Thanks, Amanda.). Do you go to an office to work, or do you go downstairs to your cool desk and computer and see what happened with your businesses during the week?
So the key is, figure it out (or figure out something that is your best guesstimate for now), and start working on it. Now. Imagine the possibilities twenty years from now if you can say “I have been working at this for twenty years”. You might actually be pretty good at it.
Use the skill sets you already have in order to get good at this new thing. Get coaching. I know guys in regular businesses who make big money. I mean Anderson Silva money. Most of them have coaches. One guy I know has four coaches that he pays a couple hundred thousand dollars a year. I know several who spend over $100k per year on coaching. Vitor Belfort said he spent that much once preparing for a fight. Many of the best fighters have similar stories. And here again is where people get it backwards. They say, wow, that guy is making a lot of money, so he is spending a lot of money on coaching for the various aspects of his game/business. Wrong (well, mostly wrong anyway). The truth is that for most of them, they got there because they FIRST spent the money (or made some kind of a deal, swap, whatever) and got the good coaching.
Here then, is your racer’s edge: most people in most businesses, don’t understand the value of top flight coaching. They don’t think they can afford it, or figure they can figure it out themselves (by watching Eddie Bravo videos maybe?). Even when they are right, they could have accelerated their development by ten or twenty years. Almost none of them get it. But you do. Combine that with your work ethic, your better understanding of marketing, etc., and that’s why your plumbing business (or whatever business you choose) will beat theirs nine times out of ten.
Another point, speaking of plumbers, etc. Think plumbing isn’t interesting? How about selling a little inexpensive barbecue grill that has been around for 30 years, usually sold only before holidays to people who couldn’t think of anything else to get a distant relative. George Foreman found it interesting enough. And he definitely enjoys the millions of dollars of passive income he continues to earn from his involvement with it.
Remember Chris Lytle the fighter? He still has his job as a full time fireman, has already run for the State Senate in Illinois, and has a bright interesting future in politics. Even the UFC donated six figures (a little more than you got paid for your last fight, right?) to his cause. One of the things he did — while he was fighting — was to lobby to get MMA legalized in Illinois. Thinking ahead, getting involved then in his future now. Very smart.
Figure out what you like (and where you think you have some skills), and start on it now. If you think about it, there will be an interesting and unique to you connection with what you are doing now and what you want to do in the future that you can start working on now.
I coach cops on how to fight — well, we call it “defensive tactics”, which is more PC, but I have the most fun coaching interesting people to get to the next level of their professional lives. Let me know if I can help.
