The Laws of the Ring (17 page)

The 21st Law of Power

Go the Extra Mile

Y
ou don't catch people's eye by doing the bare minimum. You don't advance in a profession if you're willing to do something only when there's a price tag attached to it. Proving your passion often means pursuing it for the sheer love of it. To use the example of my fighting career, you'll do it hoping it pays dividends down the line, but you won't do it
knowing
or even
expecting
it. You do it, as I did, locked in the moment. If you find something you're passionate about, you have to go the extra mile to be noticed.

Sounds good, right? But how do you get noticed? How do you transform your sense of purpose, your tireless work ethic, and your personal credit into the ability to impress other human beings? A lot of motivational speakers and self-help books preach the importance of having people skills. It's a standard, almost commonplace aspect of the genre. Think about it: How many job interviews include the prospective job applicant boasting of being a “real people person”? How many HR directors die a little inside every time they hear someone trot out the “people person” answer as a reason they should be hired? Seriously, what does it even mean?

It seems to me the terms
people skills
and
people person
have been misused and overused into meaninglessness. Is a people person someone who can carry on a credible conversation? Is it someone who can make other people feel good about themselves? Is it someone who can defuse a potentially volatile situation with a coworker or client?

Here's my definition of a people person: someone who enjoys interacting with people, has a knack for building friendships, and can use these characteristics in order to communicate and succeed. The communication may or may not be verbal. From the time I stepped into the cage, I was told I had a magnetism that drew people to my fights. It was completely unconscious; I didn't even know it existed until I felt the crowd's excitement that first night in the Colusa Casino. The idea is not only to convey your passion but to share it. This is a pretty broad category, and it includes things like communication, motivation, and charisma. It includes more tangible qualities such as organization and work ethic, and less tangible ones such as empathy and trust.

Put simply: You need to be able to communicate well enough to bring like-minded, strong-willed, successful people along with you.

Tommy Schurkamp is one of my best friends. He is also my closest and most trusted business associate. We wrestled together at UC Davis after being rivals in high school. He's from a small town called Escalon in the foothills above the San Joaquin Valley, and our teams competed against each other in the higher-level high school tournaments.

As I said before, when I bought my first house, Tommy and Virgil bought the house next door. Tommy soon became the guy I trusted and leaned on for everything from business advice to my daily schedule. When he left college, Tommy worked as a surveyor for an engineering company. He would leave the house at four-thirty in the morning, spend eight to ten hours at his surveying job, and then come home and help me organize my affairs.

Tommy would pay my bills, schedule my calendar, and organize my mail. I used to have to sell tickets to all my fights, and Tommy took charge of that. By my third fight, we were selling three hundred tickets to all our friends and their friends. It's not as easy as just leaving three hundred tickets at “will call.” The ticket purchasers didn't all know each other, and everyone had a preference for where they wanted to sit and with whom. Tommy had to make a seating chart and collect the money. Tommy became the guy who handled all the overflow in my life: getting specific food I might need, scheduling doctors' appointments, helping organize the team when it first got started. A lot of small things added up in a huge way.

And for his trouble, I paid him absolutely nothing. We were friends. I would do it for him, and he did it for me. It was never an issue, which was good because I didn't have the money to pay him, anyway. But when things got rolling with my career and our team, I offered Tommy a job as chief operating officer of Faber Enterprises. He dropped the surveying gig, no questions asked.

He was working for next to nothing, but the quality of life, by his own account, was far better than it had been. As I made my way into the limelight as a fighter, the parties grew more lavish and the people more attractive, and Tommy and I were traveling together to places as close as Canada and as far away as Japan and Brazil, having a great time along the way. But it's also important to note that jealousy and envy were never issues in our relationship. Our relationship was based on mutual respect, and we treated each other as equals. I have never felt like Tommy's boss, and I don't believe Tommy has ever felt like he is subservient to me. I trust him implicitly to make good decisions on Team Alpha Male's behalf.

Tommy's investment in the team didn't start with a financial investment. It started with a spiritual and intellectual one. As a former wrestler himself, he loves the team concept and missed it immediately after leaving UC Davis. He continued to do some martial-arts training but never pursued MMA. Instead, he became sort of a “team mom”—and I use the term lovingly—for Team Alpha Male. He started out putting together a media side to my career that allowed people to see me with viral videos (that helped lead to the Kenny Powers commercials) and created content that allowed people to get attached to my brand. Then he helped turn our team into a group that not only trained together but served as a family, complete with team dinners, golf tournaments, and an end-of-the-year banquet. Today, he's the heart of Team Alpha Male.

Flash-forward to when I started FORM Athletics with Mark Miller. Tommy was the point man for my side of the operation, which meant handling just about every aspect of the business with aplomb—most of it for little or no pay—and when we sold the company to K-Swiss for a large profit, K-Swiss recognized Tommy's hard work, business savvy, and brains and hired him to help run the team side of the brand.

At the same time Tommy continued doing a lot of the behind-the-scenes work for me and the guys on Team Alpha Male. He was helping with fight promotions and some management stuff, and he was always tossing out great ideas that always advanced our cause. His financial reward was always secondary, but Tommy's work in this regard caught the eye of Jeff Meyer and MMA Incorporated, my fight management company (the formation of which is a great story, I'll share later). It didn't take long for them to hire Tommy and put him on
that
payroll.

So yeah, Tommy's a “people person.” He could articulate our shared passion and produce real results. He's a positive person with a creative mind and an ability to converse with a wide variety of people. He's smart and he understands how to handle different types of personalities. I have no doubt he could walk back into the engineering world and make the climb up the corporate ladder in that profession if he wanted.

The bottom line is the guy who was working as a surveyor for an engineering company for little pay—and gave up the profession to work for even less as my support system—is today being paid—and paid well. He just kept working and enjoying his life, and before long, it became lucrative.

There's power in doing more than you're asked, and more than people expect of you. It's a “people skill” because it gets you noticed, and appreciated, and rewarded. It's a measure of your personal credit, the biggest people skill of all, and it ties in nicely with my desire to look for people with potential to do great things.

Tommy took a chance. He made a lifestyle out of his passion. Conventional thinking would call for him to stick it out with the engineering company, make the best of the surveying job, and wait for the inevitable promotion. And for people who are passionate about building roads, levees, and airport runways—people who are extremely valuable to society—that's the perfect approach. Go the extra mile in that profession and be noticed and rewarded the same way. This isn't to suggest that ditching a traditional profession for something as unusual as Tommy's is the only way to go. It is, however, suggesting that there are definite traits that are shared among successful people—in every profession.

And going the extra mile is one of them.

The 22nd Law of Power

Create Your Own Opportunities: Think Outside the Box

S
ometimes potential is obvious. When Joseph Benavidez showed up at the gym, anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of MMA could tell he was special. But I don't want to give the impression that everyone who walks through the door ends up being a success. As the profile of our team has grown, so has the number of guys wanting to show up and train with us. They come from all over the world, and many of them don't realize their dreams in the cage. The training is difficult and the competition is fierce, and you have to have a unique combination of talent and discipline to thrive. But some guys show up wanting to be fighters and end up showing potential in a completely different field. Maybe it turns out that they love the culture more than the act of fighting itself. We have a place for those people, too.

Dustin Akbari is a good example of this. He is my longest-standing training partner. He was fourteen when I started my training in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and he had already been on home studies for a year studying MMA full-time. Dustin was born in Texas, but raised in Iran until the age of ten, when his family came back to America. Dustin was intrigued by my mentality when I first showed up at the gym because of my intensity, and confidence about becoming a fighter. At fourteen, Dustin was still smaller than I was, but he had grit. His training was mostly in the traditional martial arts like tae kwon do, but he had recently dedicated all of his focus on BJJ and on becoming a world champion. He would train all day, and was always picking other people's brains about techniques and ways to get ahead. So every time that I came to the gym, Dustin was the first to greet me. He would ask me every day if I would teach him a new wrestling move after practice was over. I would always agree to it. Dustin told me that he wanted to fight when he grew up and wanted to learn all aspects of MMA. As time went on, he grew, and he got better and better. Before long he was my main training partner. He would come with me to kickboxing and boxing at other gyms. Dustin had a key to the jujitsu academy and taught the kids classes there. We would open the gym during off-hours, with Cassio's permission, and we would drill wrestling for an hour with me leading the way, then Dustin would lead us through an hour of BJJ.

By the time Dustin was seventeen, I was seven fights into my career and I asked him to be my cornerman for my upcoming fight. Cassio was unable to make it, and I needed someone I felt comfortable with. Dustin was more than happy to stand in the corner, ane he did a great job.

Dustin's first pro fight was less than a year later, shortly after his eighteenth birthday, and he has had several more fights over the years, but it turned out that his heart wasn't into being a fighter like he'd once thought it was. He enjoys the lifestyle and the discipline but has stopped competing in MMA at the age of twenty-three. His résumé is thick, though. He has been in twenty fights for me as a cornerman, with seventeen of those for some form of title (UFC, WEC,
Gladiator Challenge,
and
King of the Cage
). His grappling is world-class and he has world championships under his belt. Dustin has seen Team Alpha Male grow from the two of us swapping technique after hours at the BJJ gym to one of the most dominant camps in the world. Dustin is a black belt under Cassio Werneck and is the head instructor at my Ultimate Fitness Gym in downtown Sacramento. As a professional MMA fighter, he has stopped competing with a pro record of 5–1, and now spends his time training and mentoring future champions. I know in my heart that Dustin is one of the most well-rounded mixed martial artists in the world, but his goals don't involve letting the world know it.

This is a good place to talk about the gray area of a community, which comes between the buyer and the artist—or in the case of fighting, the fan and the fighter. Maybe what makes me different from others is that I have ambitions that are linked to, but that expand beyond, the scope of the cage. But even fighters whose sole focus is their fight careers need guys to train them, manage them, promote them, etc. The point is that there are roles in the fighting community that are
not
the equivalent of being a fighter and that vary in visibility, but are just as important as the guy throwing the punches.

Let's say MMA is your passion. You got into martial arts as a kid and found it to be a great outlet. It helped you overcome some issues in life by providing discipline and self-confidence. When the MMA craze hit, you never considered fighting as a career, but finally you had a sport you could identify with and follow. You work every day to pay the bills, but MMA has become your passion. You read all the magazines, you buy all the big fights, you continue to practice karate or jujitsu at a local gym. In short, you know your stuff, but the demands of everyday life—job, family—have conspired to keep your passion for MMA on the sidelines.

In short, life has relegated MMA to the status of a hobby. Does that mean it's no longer your passion? I say no, not if MMA is what you do to escape the stresses of your nine-to-five (or more) existence. Not if the gym is the place you go where none of that can touch you.

Wouldn't it be great to increase those hours of escape? Wouldn't it be fun to let your passion lead you to some unexpected place? It doesn't mean quitting your job, but it might mean looking into the possibility of working in the industry. You have to ask yourself a question: What are the different ways people are making a living off this sport, and what would be the best fit for me?

You might be surprised at how many different types of occupations have been created by the rise of MMA and UFC. There are folks who design and make the gloves we wear. There are guys who travel the country assembling the cages we fight in. There are judges and photographers, writers and referees, promoters and public relations people. Not only are there ring girls, but there is a person at every event who
takes care of
the ring girls.

Once you decide where your talents fit best, do some research and find out who is doing the job well, and why. Here's where emulation comes in. How did he, or she, get there? What unique talents are required? Emulate those people. Talk to them. You'd be amazed at how many people at the tops of their professions are flattered to receive a call or an e-mail from someone who recognizes their success.

M
ike Roberts is a great example of someone who staked out his passion and made it work around his profession. After high school, he was headed to college to play baseball, but his plans changed and his dreams were put on hold when his father had a heart attack. While his dad recovered, Mike was needed to run the family tire business. The business was very successful, but the current circumstances could have changed that drastically if Mike didn't step it up. Turned out that even at that young age, Mike had every bit as much business acumen as his father, Rich, had, and the business continued to thrive.

But secretly, his passion was combat sports. He loved fighting from its early days, and while committed to the family business, he desperately wanted to find a way to incorporate his passion into his day job. So he got creative, and managed to make Rich's Tire Barn one of the first businesses to sponsor fighters. Starting around 2002, Mike used his business to reach out to the heaviest hitters of the time—Randy Couture, Tim Sylvia, Matt Hughes, and Tito Ortiz. This was back when a relatively little guy with a relatively small business could sponsor top talent without bankrupting himself. There simply wasn't a big line to sponsor UFC fighters at the time, so Mike got a bunch of top guys to splash
RICH'S TIRE BARN
across the butts of their shorts.

But Mike sought to take his passion even further. He wanted to
manage
fighters. So he intelligently sought out Monty Cox, one of the early fight managers, and picked his brain about how to get deeper into the field. Through Cox, Mike learned how to build relationships with fighters and make connections with organizations. He began scouting local fighters in and around Sacramento, and this brought him into contact with me, Scott Smith, and James Irvin. Mike called us together and mapped out a plan for becoming our manager. When we met, I remember being impressed that he had T-shirts made for each one of us. At the time that felt big-time.

Mike introduced us to a trainer and told us he wanted us to begin training together. This was before I had my own gym, and training was a dizzying schedule of different gyms and teachers. I trained at five different gyms to learn all the disciplines, including an abandoned church in a tiny town called Sheridan, where a few of the local MMA fighters were learning BJJ from a purple belt named Chuck. The idea of a central location sounded great.

Because Mike stepped it up and helped his family business to flourish, he was given enough of a leash to incorporate his passion into it. In the end, he spent far more money than he brought in, but to his credit, he never complained. He wanted to make sure we had what we needed, and his generosity reflected that passion.

Y
our life doesn't have to be compartmentalized: work in one box, MMA in the other. It can be a little of both. Maybe you're not going to be able to quit your job and support yourself on the money you earn as an MMA referee, but you will have more fulfillment in your life, and who knows what opportunities will come from the new involvement with your passion.

Pick somebody out. Find an MMA referee who makes the right decisions and controls his fights in a way that shows he knows both the sport and the mentality of its fighters. Watch his fights and see what separates him from the average referee. Call him up. Find out how he got to where he is. Don't be shy. What's the worst he can say? No? If he says no, you move on. Simple as that. But you know what? He's not going to say no. He's going to be so flattered you contacted him that he's going to help you out. It gets back to the power of positivity: People like to be complimented. A compliment is the most disarming “rhetorical device” in any language.

If you were able to go through your workweek knowing you were going to referee a fight at the end of it, I'm guessing you would be a better employee than you are right now. I'm guessing your boss is going to see an increase in productivity because you're a happier person thanks to the refereeing gig. You're going to be less grudging of all the petty, mundane matters in your work because it's no longer your sole focus. Even without the okay of the bosses in your world, there is a way to add your passion to your day, make your days longer. Remember how Tommy went from a 4:30
A.M.
departure time to his surveying job to a full night of helping me with my action-packed hustles. Find a way and make some time because you only live once.

You might not be all the way free, but you're on your way.