Ep. 116 - Chris Hauter - "It's not who's the best, it's who's left" applied to business, life, and training as you age.

okay

so that that's the the general perspective and an audience um so from you know from your perspective what makes a great jujitsu academy

well i'm gonna launch into um one of my diatribes which i often do because like a lot of the teachers and martial artists and anyone who's done this, I think I know a lot.

And I probably know less than I think I know, but more than sometimes I want to admit, if that makes any sense, even though what I said was the exact opposite of what I opened with.

But, I have never actually owned an academy, but what I have done is gone all over the country, all over the world and taught at so many academies.

really successful ones, struggling ones, little hole in the wall, strip mall ones, warehouse academies, ones that are oriented, but towards MMA, ones that are oriented, but towards competition, towards family jujitsu.

And, um, I often say, not only because I go around the world and I'm always reading philosophy, history, and politics, I have my finger on the pulse of various things.

And one of them is I can tell almost instantly if an academy is going to be successful or not.

And it's kind of a strange, and the thing is, it almost rarely has to do with the aesthetics.

And as an artist, I want it to be about the aesthetics.

In my mind, I have a dream academy, which is probably one of the reasons.

There's a couple reasons why I don't have an academy.

And not to get in a huge life back story, but I never intended to be a jiu-jitsu instructor.

Never.

Like, that was not my goal.

In short, sometime around 20 years ago, recovering from alcoholism, had a black belt, was kind of out of the jiu-jitsu world, was a cop.

I was working... security jobs regarding rich celebrities in L.A.

I was working construction and teaching jujitsu at little academies and in my smaller garage.

And For whatever reasons, old school came back in, and suddenly, the right place, right time, all of a sudden, people wanted to have me in to teach.

And that was obviously more of a pleasurable thing to do than crawl under the house and be a plumber, or the boring long shifts when you guard a wealthy people and celebrities.

I mean, that paid well, but God, it's time consuming and boring.

And so that's kind of me.

And I had ideas of a dream academy.

And just because, again, I'm an artist with big, grandiose dreams, it had to have tall ceilings because I have to have You have to feel like if you would do a high throw, your feet aren't going to hit the acoustic tiles in the strip mall school.

It had to have climbing ropes and half of a climbing wall.